Hi Stephen,
I hope I'm understanding your problem correctly, let me know if I am misunderstanding.
You can create an XSLT file to filter through your XML, grab the specific tags you need and attach that to your DataLinq configuration. This way you can have XPression look for the filtered tags instead of the original XML that may delete some tags. If a tag doesn't exist in the XML, the XSLT should find nothing and XPression should then show a blank field.
------------------------------
Sven Whitesell
Product Specialist
Ross Video
------------------------------