Re: [xml-dev] Best way to create an XML document

["Mukul Gandhi" <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com>]

Thanks, Michael for your response (and, Andrew).

The following program worked:

import org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl;
import javax.xml.transform.sax.TransformerHandler;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import org.xml.sax.helpers.AttributesImpl;

public class MyXMLWriter {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
	try {
           TransformerFactoryImpl tfi = new TransformerFactoryImpl();
           TransformerHandler tHandler = tfi.newTransformerHandler();
           tHandler.setResult(new StreamResult(System.out));
           tHandler.startDocument();
           tHandler.startElement("", "x", "x", null);
           AttributesImpl attrs = new AttributesImpl();
           attrs.addAttribute("", "attr1","attr1", "", "123");
           attrs.addAttribute("", "attr2","attr2", "", "456");
           tHandler.startElement("", "y", "y", attrs);
           tHandler.startElement("", "z", "z", null);
           tHandler.endElement("", "z", "z");
           tHandler.endElement("", "y", "y");
           tHandler.endElement("", "x", "x");
           tHandler.endDocument();
        }
        catch(Exception ex) {
           ex.printStackTrace();
        }
   }

}

This produces output (as I intended):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><x><y attr1="123" attr2="456"><z/></y></x>

I have following follow-up questions, and would appreciate clearing my doubts:

1) Is it possible to pretty print the output?
2) Is this approach faster than using DOM serialization?
3) Here I am using the transformer functionality for creating XML,
which looks more like a XSLT feature (i.e., transformation task).
Should we not have this capability in the XML parser (for e.g., in
Xerces)? Should we have something like xml-writer (which Rob pointed)
built into Xerces (possibly as an enhancement)?

At the end of all this, it struck to me, I should try violating the
well-formedness constraint of XML and see what happens. And to my
surprise, this technique also suffers from the same problem I
mentioned with xml-writer. Why does the implementation doesn't ensure
this?

For e.g, I am able to produce this as well using this code:
<x><y attr1="123" attr2="456"><z/></y></t>   (please note, a wrong tag
</t> here).

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 8:09 PM, Michael Glavassevich
<mrglavas@ca.ibm.com> wrote:
> You haven't specified a target for the transformer to write to. Try setting
>  one with TransformerHandler.setResult().
>
>  Michael Glavassevich
>  XML Parser Development
>  IBM Toronto Lab
>  E-mail: mrglavas@ca.ibm.com
>  E-mail: mrglavas@apache.org


-- 
Regards,
Mukul Gandhi