Parse XML strings in iReport/JasperReports

I am trying to build a report using iReport. It is NOT an XML data source, but the data table includes a Blob field with XML text. I need to find how to parse the XML text and extract a field value so I can display it. These reports are used in an app that has the Select statements in .bs files. I am able to select the blob field and show the hex values, but I don't know Java well enough to use the functions in iReport to convert it to ascii or parse it. iReport can also use Groovy and Javascript, and external scriptlets can be used, so I imagine there are multiple ways of doing this. I just need one good example of this and I should be able to figure out how apply it to all the reports I need. If you have already done something like this, you might be able to meet this job without writing any code!