Implementing Splunk - Second Edition

The advanced XML structure

Before we dig into the modules provided, let's look at the structure of XML itself and cover a couple of concepts.

The tag structure of an advanced XML document is essentially as follows:

view
module
param
...
module
...

The main concept of Splunk's XML structure is that the effects of modules flow downstream to child modules.

This is a vital concept to understand. The XML structure has almost nothing to do with layout and everything to do with the flow of data.

Let's look at the following simple example:

<view template="dashboard.html"> <label>Chapter 9, Example 1</label> <module name="HiddenSearch" layoutPanel="panel_row1_col1" autoRun="True"> <param name="earliest">-99d</param> <param name="search">error | top user</param> ...