Easy Java/XML integration with JDOM, Part 2

Use JDOM to create and mutate XML

By Jason Hunter and Brett Mclaughlin, JavaWorld.com, 07/28/00

TEXTBOX: TEXTBOX_HEAD: Easy Java/XML integration with JDOM: Read the whole series!

• Part 1. Learn about a new API for working with XML
• Part 2. Use JDOM to create and mutate XML

In this article, we tell the rest of the story and explain how you can modify XML documents or even create them from scratch. JDOM accomplishes those tasks, using standard conventions as much as possible, and lets you create, change, or move nearly every document component at runtime.

One word of warning before we begin: The JDOM API is in beta and subject to change until the 1.0 release. That release is expected within the next few months, but it may happen sooner or later, depending on when the JDOM community approves on the solidity of the design and implementation. Keep an eye on the JDOM Website for changes.

Creating a Document

In Part 1 you learned how to construct a JDOM Document from an external source:

SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();  // parameters control validation, etc
Document doc = builder.build(url);

It's also possible and even easier to construct a JDOM Document from scratch with no existing XML data store:

Element root = new Element("myRootElement");
Document doc = new Document(root);

As simple as that, you can construct an Element and a Document using that Element as the document root. At that point, normal document manipulation can occur as well:

root.setText("This is a root element");

The above code sets the root element's text content to the given string. If the Document were to output now, using XMLOutputter as discussed in Part 1, the result would be the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>This is a root element</root>

One major advantage of JDOM is that you don't need to use factories or other advanced programming models to create either the JDOM Document or constructs within the Document. You can compare that to DOM, which requires the following code to accomplish the same task: (We cannot compare it to SAX because SAX is a read-only API.)

// DOM code:
// Creating the document is vendor-specific, or requires the use of JAXP
Document doc = new org.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl();
// Create the root node and its text node, using the document as a factory
Element root = myDocument.createElement("myRootElement");
Text text = myDocument.createText("This is a root element");
// Put the nodes into the document tree
root.appendChild(text);
myDocument.appendChild(root);

One thing you'll notice is that with DOM you don't have a standard way to create a Document. You have to either use implementation-specific commands or use Sun Microsystems' new JAXP API, which doesn't work with all parsers and doesn't yet support DOM2 and SAX 2.0. With JDOM, that is not an issue because JDOM documents are created through normal construction calls. You'll also notice that a DOM Node is always constructed through a factory method on its parent Document. That poses the strange chicken-and-egg problem that a DOM Element can only be created using a DOM Document object, but an XML Document should never exist without a root element! Again, with JDOM that is not an issue because elements can be created independently of documents.