Not getting attribute from a xml file into asp - asp-classic

Question

I have the following xml result from this link - https://api.eveonline.com/eve/CharacterID.xml.aspx?names=BorisKarlov
<eveapi version="2">
<currentTime>2013-01-16 18:57:38</currentTime>
<result>
<rowset name="characters" key="characterID" columns="name,characterID">
<row name="BorisKarlov" characterID="315363291"/>
</rowset>
</result>
<cachedUntil>2013-02-16 18:57:38</cachedUntil>
</eveapi>
and I am trying to extract the characterID into asp. I am using the following code,
Set oXML = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0")
oXML.LoadXML("https://api.eveonline.com/eve/CharacterID.xml.aspx?names=BorisKarlov")
Set oRoot = oXML.selectSingleNode("//result")
For Each oNode In oRoot.childNodes
response.Write oNode.Attributes.getNamedItem("characterID").Text
Next
Set oXML = Nothing
All i keep getting is the following error:
Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a01a8'
Object required: 'oRoot'
.............
I can only assume that Set oRoot = oXML.selectSingleNode("//result") is not actually generating any data and therefore throwing up the error in the next line.
Can anyone please shed some light on my problem?

Answer 1

You have a few problems there.
loadXML() is for loading a block of XML as a string, not fetching from a remote server; for that, you need to use load()
when loading from a server, you need to tell it to use the ServerXMLHTTP component, and set async to false so that it waits until loaded before executing the rest of your script.
when I tried loading that XML, I got an encoding error; you will need to resolve that one way or another
when I loaded the XML directly from a string, it wouldn't parse because there is a script element containing non-XML content; that needs to be contained within a CDATA section
your XPath query is to //result, but you actually need it to be //result/rowset
This code should work once you resolve issues 3 and 4 above:
Set oXML = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0")
oXML.async = False
oXML.setProperty "ServerHTTPRequest", true
oXML.Load("https://api.eveonline.com/eve/CharacterID.xml.aspx?names=BorisKarlov")
If oXML.parseError.errorCode <> 0 Then
Response.Write "<p>XML parse error: " & Server.HTMLEncode(oXML.parseError.reason) & "</p>"
Else
Set oRoot = oXML.selectSingleNode("//result/rowset")
If oRoot Is Nothing Then
response.write "Nothing!"
response.end
End If
For Each oNode In oRoot.childNodes
response.Write oNode.Attributes.getNamedItem("characterID").Text
Next
End If
Set oXML = Nothing
Edit: to get around the problem #3, and oddly also #4 (don't know why!), use this snippet to load the XML instead. For some reason, I think the code above isn't handling the gzip compressed stream correctly, but this code below does.
Set oXML = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0")
Set xh = Server.CreateObject("Msxml2.ServerXMLHTTP.6.0")
xh.open "GET", "https://api.eveonline.com/eve/CharacterID.xml.aspx?names=BorisKarlov", False
xh.send
xml = xh.responseText
oXML.LoadXML xml