[FEATURE REQ] - Export Policy as XML instead of RAWXML

[Banchio]

Please describe the feature.

After exporting from an existing APIM, it is not always possible to programmatically parse policies files as regular xml because of validation errors. A possible solution would be to include a flag (both in extractor and publisher) to treat policies as regular xml files and not rawxml, something similar to the OpenApi yaml/json formats basically

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[Banchio]

By looking at the code I found that the parameter format=rawxml is added in every type involving Policies (ApiOperationPolicy, ApiPolicy, PolicyFragment, ProductPolicy and ServicePolicy). However it is not clear to me how to retrieve a new config setting from DI in the classes that use these records. Will try to do a debug step-by-step to better understand it.

[guythetechie]

@Banchio - APIM policies support .NET code within the XML files through policy expressions. Here's an example:

<fragment>
  <set-header name="x-request-over-limit" exists-action="override">
    <value>
      @((context.LastError == null) && (int.Parse(context.Request.Headers["Limit"][0]) > 100) ? "Over limit" : "Under limit")
    </value>
  </set-header>
</fragment>

We use rawxml to support these usecases. xml encodes many characters and makes the underlying file harder to read. The fragment above would turn into this:

@((context.LastError == null) && (int.Parse(context.Request.Headers[\"Limit\"][0]) > 100) ? \"Over limit\" : \"Under limit\")

If you want to include an XML parsing step in your pipelines, I would suggest first running the file through a step to escape invalid XML characters, and then parsing the escaped file.

[Banchio]

totally agree that is harder to read but in this format I cannot use Powershell select-xml statement (or anything else that expect a well formatted xml). I tried to replace double quotes within the @( and ) as well as double quotes between @{ and } but gave up on multi-line dotnet code which needed to be escaped. Especially for programmatically parsing that would be great, I read your comment on the PR will retry when new version will be published then, thanks!