Viewing PIES xml Files

Product files delivered in the PIES format offers many advantages over flat files. XML is easy for computers to read and process. Unfortunately, the formatting that makes it easy for computers makes it difficult for us to read.

Also, it is not unusual to see PIES XML files over 500 MB in size. Just trying to open such large files in a web browser or text editor can cause your computer to run out of resources and become unresponsive.

PIES Assistant provides and easy to use viewer that can efficiently read any size PIES file. The viewer shows a separate tab for the four top-level sections (“Header”, “Price Sheets”, “Marketing Copy” and “Items”):

The last two tabs (“Validation Results” and “Code Reference”) let you see infromation about the file and about the currently loaded PCdb reference tables.