1. More DOM
28-Nov-18

2. Manipulating DOM trees
DOM, unlike SAX, gives you the ability to create and modify XML trees
There are a few roadblocks along the way
Practically everything in the JAXP implementation is an interface, with a few abstract classes
Interfaces, such as Node, don’t have constructors; this makes it hard to get started
Since DOM was designed to be applicable from a number of languages, many things are not done “the Java way”
Once you get past these problems, the individual methods are pretty straightforward
Even with straightforward methods, working with trees is seldom simple

3. Overview There are three basic kinds of operations:
Creating a new DOM
Modifying the structure of a DOM
Modifying the content of a DOM
Creating a new DOM requires a few extra methods just to get started
Afterwards, you can “grow” the DOM by modifying its structure and content

4. Creating a DOM import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
try {
DocumentBuilderFactory factory =
DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder =
factory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = builder.newDocument(); }
catch (ParserConfigurationException e) { ... }

5. The rest of the methods
Most of the other methods are either instance methods of a Document object, or are inherited from Node
A few are from Attr, Text, Entity, and so on
Almost all of these methods may throw a DOMException
I’ll just go through some of the more important methods briefly
The details can be looked up in the API if needed

6. Creating structure The following are instance methods of Document:
public Element createElement(String tagName)
public Element createElementNS(String namespaceURI, String qualifiedName)
public Attr createAttribute(String name)
public Attr createAttributeNS(String namespaceURI, String qualifiedName)
public ProcessingInstruction createProcessingInstruction (String target, String data)
public EntityReference createEntityReference(String name)
The above may all throw a DOMException
public Text createTextNode(String data)
public Comment createComment(String data)

7. Methods inherited from Node
public Node appendChild(Node newChild)
public Node insertBefore(Node newChild, Node refChild)
public Node removeChild(Node oldChild)
public Node replaceChild(Node newChild, Node oldChild)
setNodeValue(String nodeValue)
What this does depends on the type of node
public void setPrefix(String prefix)
public void normalize()
Combines adjacent TextNodes

8. Methods of Element public void setAttribute(String name, String value)
public Attr setAttributeNode(Attr newAttr)
public void setAttributeNodeNS(String namespaceURI, String qualifiedName, String value)
public Attr setAttributeNodeNS(Attr newAttr)
public void removeAttribute(String name)
public void removeAttributeNS(String namespaceURI, String localName)
public Attr removeAttributeNode(Attr oldAttr)

9. Method of Attr public void setValue(String value)
This is the only method that modifies an Attr; the rest just get information

10. Writing out the DOM as XML
There are no Java-supplied methods for writing out a DOM as XML
Writing out a DOM is conceptually simple—it’s just a tree walk
However, there are a lot of details—various node types and so on—so doing a good job isn’t complicated, but it is lengthy

11. The End