A user on cf-talk today posted about a problem he was having with Spry. He had tested with an XML file, but then he switched to passing an XML string directly to Spry:

<script> var dsTasks = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("<cfoutput>#tasks#</cfoutput>","tasks/task"); </script>

This isn't valid. However, there is a way to do this in Spry. Simply create your dataset with a null url:

var dsTasks = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet(null, "tasks/task");

Then create an XML object out of your string:

var xmlDOMDocument = Spry.Utils.stringToXMLDoc(xmlStr);

Finally, tell the dataset to use your XML object as the data:

dsTasks.setDataFromDoc(xmlDOMDocument);

A live example of this may be found here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/data_region/XMLStringSample.html