Hi. In this case rootTag is required also. Otherwise it will be the default "ROWS".

I have attributes at root level (in bold) before rows

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<root x = 1>
 <rat1>434343</rat1>
 <rat2>
 <x>4</x>
 <y>6</y>
 </rat2>
 <rows>
  <row>
   <a>5</a>
   <b>5</b>
  </row>
  <row>
   <a>5</a>
   <b>5</b>
  </row>
</rows>
</root>

The best would be bypassing rootTag and rowTag as my dataframe has the full nested structure. The behaviour should be same as json libraries