Parsing XML into programming languages JAXP, DOM, SAX, JDOM/DOM4J, Xerces, Xalan, JAXB

Parsing XML Goal: read XML files into data structures in programming languages Possible strategies –Parse by hand with some reusable libraries –Parse into generic tree structure –Parse as sequence of events –Automagically parse to language-specific objects

Parsing by-hand Advantages –Complete control –Good if simple needs – build off of regex package Disadvantages –Must write the initial code yourself, even if it becomes generalized –Pretty tedious and error prone. –Gets very hard when using schema or DTD to validate

Parsing into generic tree structure Advantages –Industry-wide, language neutral standard exists called DOM (Document Object Model) –Learning DOM for one language makes it easy to learn for any other –As of JAXP 1.2, support for Schema –Have to write much less code to get XML to something you want to manipulate in your program Disadvantages –Non-intuitive API, doesn’t take full advantage of Java –Still quite a bit of work

What is JAXP? JAXP: Java API for XML Processing –In the Java language, the definition of these standard API’s (together with XSLT API) comprise a set of interfaces known as JAXP –Java also provides standard implementations together with vendor pluggability layer –Some of these come standard with J2SDK, others are only available with Web Services Developers Pack –We will study these shortly

Another alternative JDOM: Native Java published API for representing XML as tree Like DOM but much more Java-specific, object oriented However, not supported by other languages Also, no support for schema Dom4j another alternative

JAXB JAXB: Java API for XML Bindings Defines an API for automagically representing XML schema as collections of Java classes. Most convenient for application programming Will cover next class

DOM

About DOM Stands for Document Object Model A World Wide Web Consortium (w3c) standard Standard constantly adding new features – Level 3 Core just released in the past six months Well cover most of the basics. There’s always more, and it’s always changing.

DOM abstraction layer in Java -- architecture Returns specific parser implementation org.w3d.dom.Document Emphasis is on allowing vendors to supply their own DOM Implementation without requiring change to source code

Sample Code DocumentBuilderFactor factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); /* set some factory options here */ DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document doc = builder.parse(xmlFile); A factory instance is the parser implementation. Can be changed with runtime System property. Jdk has default. Xerces much better. From the factory one obtains an instance of the parser xmlFile can be an java.io.File, an inputstream, etc. javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder org.w3c.dom.Document For reference. Notice that the Document class comes from the w3c-specified bindings.

Validation Note that by default the parser will not validate against a schema or DTD As of JAXP1.2, java provides a default parser than can handle most schema features See next slide for details on how to setup

Important: Schema validation String JAXP_SCHEMA_LANGUAGE = " String W3C_XML_SCHEMA = " Next, you need to configure DocumentBuilderFactory to generate a namespace-aware, validating parser that uses XML Schema: … DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance() factory.setNamespaceAware(true); factory.setValidating(true); try { factory.setAttribute(JAXP_SCHEMA_LANGUAGE, W3C_XML_SCHEMA); } catch (IllegalArgumentException x) { // Happens if the parser does not support JAXP }

Associating document with schema An xml file can be associated with a schema in two ways 1.Directly in xml file in regular way 2.Programmatically from java Latter is done as: –factory.setAttribute(JAXP_SCHEMA_SOURCE, new File(schemaSource));

A few notes Factory allows ease of switching parser implementations –Java provides simple DOM implementation, but much better to use vendor-supplied when doing serious work –Xerces, part of apache project, is installed on cluster as Eclipse plugin. We’ll use next week. –Note that some properties are not supported by all parser implementations.

Document object Once a Document object is obtained, rich API to manipulate. First call is usually Element root = doc.getDocumentElement(); This gets the root element of the Document as an instance of the Element class Note that Element subclasses Node and has methods getType(), getName(), and getValue(), and getChildNodes()

Types of Nodes Note that there are many types of Nodes (ie subclasses of Node: Attr, CDATASection, Comment, Document, DocumentFragment, DocumentType, Element, Entity, EntityReference, Notation, ProcessingInstruction, Text Each of these has a special and non-obvious associated type, value, and name. Standards are language-neutral and are specified on chart on following slide Important: keep this chart nearby when using DOM

Node nodeName() nodeValue()AttributesnodeType() Attr Attr nameValue of attributenull 2 CDATASection #cdata-sectionCDATA cotnentnull 4 Comment #commentComment contentnull 8 Document #document Null null 9 DocumentFragment #document- fragment null 11 DocumentType Doc type name null 10 Element Tag name null NamedNodeMap 1 Entity Entity name null 6 EntityReference Name entitry referenced null 5 Notation Notation name null 1 ProcessingInstruction target Entire string null 7 Text #text Actual text null 3

Transforming XML

The JAXP Transformation Packages JAXP Transformation APIs: –javax.xml.transform This package defines the factory class you use to get a Transformer object. You then configure the transformer with input (Source) and output (Result) objects, and invoke its transform() method to make the transformation happen. The source and result objects are created using classes from one of the other three packages. –javax.xml.transform.dom Defines the DOMSource and DOMResult classes that let you use a DOM as an input to or output from a transformation. –javax.xml.transform.sax Defines the SAXSource and SAXResult classes that let you use a SAX event generator as input to a transformation, or deliver SAX events as output to a SAX event processor. –javax.xml.transform.stream Defines the StreamSource and StreamResult classes that let you use an I/O stream as an input to or output from a transformation.

Transformer Architecture

Writing DOM to XML public class WriteDOM{ public static void main(String[] argv) throws Exception{ File f = new File(argv[0]); DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); Document document = builder.parse(f); TransformerFactory tFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance(); Transformer transformer = tFactory.newTransformer(); DOMSource source = new DOMSource(document); StreamResult result = new StreamResult(System.out); transformer.transform(source, result); }

Creating a DOM from scratch Sometimes you may want to create a DOM tree directly in memory. This is done with: DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance(); DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder(); document = builder.newDocument();

Manipulating Nodes Once the root node is obtained, typical tree methods exist to manipulate other elements: boolean node.hasChildNodes() NodeList node.getChildNodes() Node node.getNextSibling() Node node.getParentNode() String node.getValue(); String node.getName(); String node.getText(); void setNodeValue(String nodeValue); Node insertBefore(Node new, Node ref);

SAX Simple API for XML Processing

About SAX SAX in Java is hosted on source forge SAX is not a w3c standard Originated purely in Java Other languages have chosen to implement in their own ways based on this prototype

SAX vs. … Please don’t compare unrelated things: –SAX is an alternative to DOM, but realize that DOM is often built on top of SAX –SAX and DOM do not compete with JAXP –They do both compete with JAXB implementations

How a SAX parser works SAX parser scans an xml stream on the fly and responds to certain parsing events as it encounters them. This is very different than digesting an entire XML document into memory. Much faster, requires less memory. However, need to reparse if you need to revisit data.

Obtaining a SAX parser Important classes javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory; javax.xml.parsers.SAXParser; javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException; //get the parser SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance(); SAXParser saxParser = factory.newSAXParser(); //parse the document saxParser.parse( new File(argv[0]), handler);

DefaultHandler Note that an event handler has to be passed to the SAX parser. This must implement the interface org.xml.sax.ContentHandler; Easier to extend the adapter org.xml.sax.helpers.DefaultHandler

Overriding Handler methods Most important methods to override –void startDocument() Called once when document parsing begins –void endDocument() Called once when parsing ends – void startElement(...) Called each time an element begin tag is encountered –void endElement(...) Called each time an element end tag is encountered –void characters(...) Called randomly between startElement and endElement calls to accumulated character data

startElement public void startElement( String namespaceURI, //if namespace assoc String sName, //nonqualified name String qName, //qualified name Attributes attrs) //list of attributes Attribute info is obtained by querying Attributes objects.

Characters public void characters( char buf[], //buffer of chars accumulated int offset, //begin element of chars int len) //number of chars Note, characters may be called more than once between begin tag / end tag Also, mixed-content elements require careful handling

Entity references Recall that entity references are special character sequences for referring to characters that have special meaning in XML syntax –‘<‘ is &lt –‘>’ is &gt In SAX these are automatically converted and passed to the characters stream unless they are part of a CDATA section

Choosing a Parser Choosing your Parser Implementation –If no other factory class is specified, the default SAXParserFactory class is used. To use a different manufacturer's parser, you can change the value of the environment variable that points to it. You can do that from the command line, like this: java -Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=yourFactoryHere... The factory name you specify must be a fully qualified class name (all package prefixes included). For more information, see the documentation in the newInstance() method of the SAXParserFactory class.

Validating SAX Parsers String JAXP_SCHEMA_LANGUAGE = " String W3C_XML_SCHEMA = " Next, you need to configure DocumentBuilderFactory to generate a namespace-aware, validating parser that uses XML Schema: … SaxParserFactory factory = SaxParserFactory.newInstance() factory.setNamespaceAware(true); factory.setValidating(true); try { factory.setAttribute(JAXP_SCHEMA_LANGUAGE, W3C_XML_SCHEMA); } catch (IllegalArgumentException x) { // Happens if the parser does not support JAXP }

Transforming arbitrary data structures using SAX and Transformer

Goal Now that we know SAX and a little about Transformations, there are some cool things we can do. One immediate thing is to create xml files from plain text files using the help of a faux SAX parser Turns out to be more robust than doing by hand

Transformers Recall that transformers easily let us go between any source and result by arbitrary wirings of –StreamSource / StreamResult –SAXSource / SAXResult –DOMSource / DOMResult We used this to write a DOM tree to an XML file Now we will use a SAXSource together with a StreamResult to convert our text file

Strategy We construct our own SAXParser – ie a class that implements the XMLReader interface This class must have a parse method (among others) We use parse to read our input file and fire the appropriate SAX events.

What? What are we really doing here? We’re having the SAXParser pretend as though it has encountered certain SAX XML events when it reads the text file. Exactly where we pretend these things occur is where the appropriate XML will get written by the transformer

Main snippet public static void main (String argv []){ StudentReader parser = new StudentReader(); TransformerFactory tFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance(); Transformer transformer = tFactory.newTransformer(); FileReader fr = new FileReader(“students.txt”); BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr); InputSource inputSource = new InputSource(fr); SAXSource source = new SAXSource(parser, inputSource); StreamResult result = new StreamResult(System.out); transformer.transform(source, result); } create transformer Create SAX “parser” Use text as result Use text File as Transformer source

XMLReader implementation To have a valid SAXSource we need a class that implements XMLReader interface public void parse(InputSource input) public void setContentHandler(ContentHandler handler) public ContentHandler getContentHandler(). Shown are the important methods for a simple app

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