[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 11:48 AM -0400 9/22/02, John Cowan wrote:
>In any case, this stuff is trivial under XOM. You invoke a Builder
>from a StringReader, get the document element, detach it, and insert
>it into the main document where you want it to go. This works because
>XOM nodes, unlike DOM nodes, can freely be ported from one document
>to another without doing anything magic and expensive to them.
>
Hmm, you know now that you mention it, this isn't so trivial. The one
element you can't detach is the root element because that would make
its document malformed. If this is a common use-case, I'll need to
figure out how to support that.
Possibly I could make inserting a Document object vaguely like
inserting a DocumentFragment in DOM; that is, all the nodes get moved
over. But I'd still have to copy them to avoid having nodes in two
documents at once. And then the reference you inserted may not point
to the object in the tree. Messy.
It could also be done by copying instead of detaching; i.e. invoke a Builder
from a StringReader, get the document element, copy it, and insert
the copy into the main document where you want it to go. That's
fairly clean, but it does build the element twice.
If I provide a method to do this internally, it gets a little nicer.
I can just build a document, save the root element, replace the old
root element with an empty element, and return the old element. The
client code would never see the Document object so it wouldn't matter
if it was a little funky. The problem with this, is that sometimes
the client code may want the whole Document instead of just an
Element.
More thought is required here. Suggestions are appreciated.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| XML in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/ |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|
