ADF Copy Data Activity: XML Documents with only one item in list is not accepted as a list

Question

For a Data Copy Activity, when you have XML as source, it does not accept documents with only one item in the array as a valid array.
This occurs quite frequently for me when XML is the source and data is in many files. An array should consist of zero to many items and I cannot see it as anything else then a bug that a array must have at least two items to be considered an array for XML as a source.

Currently the only workaround is to have separate handling for files with one item and files with more than one.

Any solution to this?

Answer 1

Hello @Christian Dalen and welcome to Microsoft Q&A.

I ran into a similar issue a while back. If I remember correctly, the issue was that in XML, when there is only a single element, there is nothing to differentiate array from a single property.

In DataFlow there is a solution to this, but I do not remember there being a solution in Copy Activity back then. I will need to check whether there is now. As of April 2021 it was recommended to use DataFlow instead.

The DataFlow solution:
To read single xml element as array, you need to import the source projection with a sample file with multiple elements, then it can read it as array. When there is only 1 element, it gets imported as struct.