Module

Interface

org.ten60.netkernel.xml.representation.IAspectXDA

Class

org.ten60.netkernel.xml.representation.DOMXDAAspect

Purpose

XDA was developed by 1060 Research to provide a number of convenient XPath operations including iterators.

The org.ten60.netkernel.xml.xda package (Javadoc) in the ext_xml_core module contains an XPath based API for processing XML. It is a compromise between a low-level XML API and a fully declarative approach to XML processing.

The philosophy of the XDA API is to use XPath expressions as the addressing model for low-level document manipulation operations. This is very convenient for rapid development and allows code to be much more readily modified and maintained when changes to the XML data model are made. In addition the XDA XPath model supports iterators, which allows iterations over a sub-tree to be performed.

IXDAReadOnly

The XDA API is two-part. The IXDAReadOnly interface allows XDA objects to be interogated but not changed.

Abstraction

The XDA API is abstracted from any underlying document object model. It is initially implemented on top of DOM with the DOMXDA implementation. Other implementations on alternative document models such as JDOM or even SAX (though this might be expensive!) could be developed.

Iterators

Iterators over an XML document can be created. An iterator is generally created with an XPath that targets multiple locations. The iterator then can be used to iterate over those locations. Take care to use relative XPath locations for any operations using the iterator since you should should not operate on Nodes that are part of the iterating set.