Parse your first model

parseArchiModel accepts XML text only. Reading a file from disk, using the browser File API, or fetching XML over the network is the caller’s responsibility — this keeps the package usable from Node.js, browser bundlers, and tests without coupling it to a specific I/O environment.

Minimal example

import {
  parseArchiModel,
  validateArchiModel,
} from '@cda/archi-semantic-core';

const model = parseArchiModel(xml);

console.log(model.elements);
console.log(model.relationships);
console.log(model.views);

console.log(model.elements[0].type);
// e.g. "ApplicationComponent", not "archimate:ApplicationComponent"

const { valid, errors } = validateArchiModel(model);

Reading from disk

import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
import { parseArchiModel } from '@cda/archi-semantic-core';

const xml = await readFile('MyModel.archimate', 'utf8');
const model = parseArchiModel(xml);

Archi saves a model as a zip archive — model.xml plus an images/ entry per embedded icon — whenever the model has embedded images. A zip archive is binary, not text: reading it with a text decoder before detecting the format corrupts it beyond recovery. If the file might be a zip, read raw bytes and pass them through extractArchiModelXml first:

import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises';
import { extractArchiModelXml } from '@cda/archi-semantic-core/archive';
import { parseArchiModel } from '@cda/archi-semantic-core';

const bytes = await readFile('MyModel.archimate'); // bytes, not text
const xml = extractArchiModelXml(bytes);            // handles plain XML or a zip
const model = parseArchiModel(xml);

See Working with .archimate archives for details.

What you get back

parseArchiModel returns an ArchiModel whose collections are flat arrays in source-XML order:

Collection	Contents
`folders`	The model tree (Business, Application, Relations, Views, custom folders).
`elements`	All semantic elements, any ArchiMate type.
`relationships`	All semantic relationships.
`views`	All diagram/view definitions.
`diagramObjects`	Visual nodes: diagram objects, groups, model references.
`diagramConnections`	Visual connections between diagram objects.
`notes`	Free-text diagram notes.
`profiles`	Specializations and generic Profiles declared at the model root.

Cross-references between collections are plain string ids — look them up in the relevant array, or build a Map keyed by id for repeated lookups (see Build lookup indexes).

Error behavior

parseArchiModel throws when:

the input is not a string;
the XML is not well formed.

It does not throw for a semantically broken model (missing ids, dangling references, unresolved Junction values) — use validateArchiModel for structural checks.