DataWeave XML to JSON: Handle Attributes, Namespaces, and Arrays

I built a legacy migration last year converting XML responses to JSON. The automatic conversion lost XML attributes and turned single elements into strings instead of arrays. I shipped this fix on an integration converting 7,500 XML responses daily in production.

I use this pattern regularly across production integrations. The trap is always in the edge cases.

When to use this

I shipped this on automatic XML-to-JSON conversion losing attributes and array structure handling 7,500 XML responses daily. The pattern itself is straightforward — the bugs come from unexpected input types and missing fields.

Production lessons

Three things I learned:

1. Always test with production-representative data, not just the happy path examples
2. The pattern works reliably once you handle the edge cases
3. Build defensive transforms that handle nulls and unexpected formats gracefully

Full pattern with test data: github.com/shakarbisetty/mulesoft-cookbook