XML parsing in Java with XPath (ctd)

Having now introduced the concepts of XML and XPath, we'll look at the standard Java API for reading an XML document using XPath. Two APIs are actually involved: the DOM or Document Object Model API, which gets the contents of an XML file into an object representation in memory, and the XPath API itself, which works on DOM objects. Both APIs are somewhat clumsy, but of the various clumsy options available, they're still generally the most practical.

Getting the DOM representation

The code to get the DOM representation looks as follows. It ultimately leaves us with a Document object:

import javax.xml.parsers.*;
import org.w3c.dom.*;

File xmlFile = ...
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
Document doc = db.parse(xmlFile);

Evaluating an XPath query

The syntax for evaluating an XPath query in Java is a little bit topsy-turvy: we create an XPath object, via which we then evaluate an expression. The code looks like this:

import javax.xml.xpath.*;

Document doc = ... // as above
String exp = "/configuration/maxConnections/text()";
XPath xp = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
String maxConnsStr = xp.evaluate(exp, doc);

The XPath.evaluate() method usually gives us a string, but it's easy enough to extract an integer from this string, for example:

int maxConns = Integer.parseInt(maxConnsStr);

Next

On the next page, we look at a performance issue that occurs when using the XPath API from an applet, and suggest a slightly clumsy workaround to this problem.