Thank you for the answers, Ole.  I'll look into your suggestion while I await the tutorial. 

First off, thank you for a great product!

Now, I have a question regarding data sources and the Remove Empty Content feature.  I posted a similar question already but thought the questions were different enough to warrant separate topics.  When using an Excel spreadsheet as a data source, is there a way in SoapUI Pro (I'm currently on 2.0) to accomplish the following?

I want to be able to have "empty" cells in my Excel spreadsheet data source, some of which would cause the target elements in the request to be removed and some of which would leave empty target elements in the request.

I'm thinking that I would have to:
1. Fill out to-be-removed elements as empty cells in the spreadsheet
2. Fill out to-be-empty elements with some magic value, say "!EMPTY!"
3. Turn the Remove Empty Content feature off for the request step
4. Write a Groovy script, placed before the request step, that will remove empty elements.
5. Write a Groovy script, placed in between the request step and the above Groovy script, that will replace "!EMPTY!" with a blank string or a null value

Does this sound like something that could work as desired?  Is there an easier way, perhaps one already supported?  In the little searching I've done so far I haven't stumbled upon a solution, so pardon me if I've missed something obvious.

When using the Remove Empty Content feature SoapUI 2.0 Pro is correctly removing empty (and whitespace only) elements.  However, is there a way to also remove parent elements if all sibling elements were removed?

I couldn't find an answer in the user guide (http://www.soapui.org/userguide/requests.html#Request_Details_Tab), so I hope I haven't missed anything obvious.

Right now I have inserted ahead of the request step in my test case a Groovy step which takes care of removing parent elements all the way up to the root element if need be.  Unfortunately, the script is not general purpose but has been taylored to the specific message schema.  I was hoping that there would be some built-in functionality to achieve the same thing.