# Ingest XML

Many systems export information in XML format and CFS has features to help you convert XML into IDOL documents.

NOTE: The XML must be encoded in UTF-8.

You can configure CFS to transform XML files, with an XSL transformation, before they are processed. This is an optional step but can be useful in cases where your XML files do not resemble IDOL documents or you are processing XML from many sources and the files have different schemas. You can configure any number of transformations and CFS runs the first transformation where the ingested XML matches the specified schema. You can also configure a default transformation that CFS runs when an XML file does not match any of your schemas.

After an XML file has been transformed, or when transformation is not configured, CFS attempts to convert the XML into IDOL documents. The XML is parsed according to the rules that you configure in the `[XmlParsing]` section of the CFS configuration file. If the conversion is successful, the resulting metadata-only documents are added to the ingest queue (for more information about the ingestion process, see The Ingestion Process). If the conversion does not result in any IDOL documents but the XML was transformed after matching a schema, CFS does not consider this as a failure and does not index any documents. Otherwise, for example if the XML is invalid, the XML file is added to the import queue so that it is processed by KeyView along with other file types.

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