DSXchange

XML should be "one long string". Only peoples 'need' that pretty printed structure, no consumer of the file will. However, the Formatted option in the stage will do something like that for you... emphasis on something like that. My advice? Don't bother, continue to let tools like IE (temporarily) do that for you automagically when you peek at it.

From my POV, I would very much rather it be "one long string" for a simple reason: People will insert control characters where they don't belong. I recently had to deal with a line feed break in a message field because the person creating it (test file feed) didn't like the way it looked.

It also takes up less space. I've seen REDICULOUSLY large xml documents that were reduced by a third in size just by removing blanks and carriage return line feeds. Important when you are shipping them all over the place in transactional packets.

Ernie

Thank you all