Joe Thanks for the reply, that is pretty much what I thought about the flowfile attributes. I'll have to have a think about that one to see if I can work out a way around it. With the merging, we will get multiple xml files which will be related by an attribute, I want to combine them into one xml file which I can validate before sending it on. I will have a look at the merge content to combine the xml files into one flowfile and then use an xslt transformer to get rid of unwanted bits and put the whole lot into a xml format that I can validate.
Dave
