Sometimes a service is defined to return a string, but the content of the string is actually XML data. The problem is that, although BPEL provides support for manipulating XML data (using XPath queries, expressions, and so on), this functionality is not available if the variable or field is a string type. With Java, you use DOM functions to convert the string to a structured XML object type. You can use the BPEL XPath function parseEscapedXML to do the same thing.

For information about parseEscapedXML, see parseEscapedXML.