For starters, if you don’t have it, you might want to get yourself a good open-source XML editor that can display XML tables and create schemas to help you understand structure (have a comment about Excel and MS Access or other database software at end).
Here’s a recent review of free XML editors (I have a different pricey one that doesn’t come free). https://appuals.com/the-5-best-free-xml-editors/
XmlPad appears to have a lot of what it takes to view an MSFS xml file and make sense of it. Here’s the 30-mycompany-biomes.xml file in the vegetation folder (path is MSFS SDK\Samples\SimpleBiomes\PackageSources\vegetation) displayed as an XML table:
Here’s a diagrammatic schema of the XML structure prepared by XmlPad:
To avoid the diagram running on forever from left to right, elements at a certain level that contain further nested elements are left unexpanded and further branches descending down the tree are diagrammed on subsequent lines as for BiomeRule + (red circled item) and other elements down the tree.
You can also import XML files into Microsoft Excel and map XML elements to columns in a table but I’m afraid my remembrance of how to do that with nested structures is about a decade old and mostly forgotten. XML files can be imported into a database like Microsoft Access, too, but I think a good XML editor, like XmlPad seems to be, can be a quicker, easier way of understanding XML structure and the type of data associated with particular elements at a particular level in the XML tree. XmlPad can export tables in .DBF4 database format and .CSV files and Excel and Access can read both formats as well as XML directly. The regular folks working on the MSFS SDK can probably offer better suggestions.
