Abstract

XMLUtil provides a set of easy-to-used apis to retrieve data from XML document. By using XMLUtil, you can:

• construct XMLUtil object from XML file name, or an XML element;
• retrieve an element's String value by passing a directory-like node path;
• retrieve a set of sibling nodes into Vector;
• retrieve a set of sibling nodes into Hashtable, hash key is attribute value;
• and much more.

XMLUtil has been extensively used in two open-sourced projects, jtestcase and xtype.

Properties

The behaviour of XMLUtil can be controlled via a couple of system properties. These properties can be set by providing a -D argument to the VM or by using System.setProperty() in your application.

• xmlutil.script.validation:
  
  If set to "false" this property turns off the validation of XML documents against their schema during load in the class XMLUtil. Attention: This property does not turn off validation in the class XMLValidator (which would make no sense, because this is the only purposeof this class). The default is "true".
• xmlutil.validate.dom:
  
  If set to "true" the validation in the class XMLValidator is done with the DOM parser. If set to "false" the SAX parser is used. The default is "false".
• xmlutil.parser.version:
  
  This property is only needed if a Xerces2 parser should be used. In this case this property has to be set to "Xerces2" to get the schema validation to work.

Software prerequisites

• XML Parser: Xerces version 1.4.1 or above that is XML Schema enabled (see properties section for details on Xerces2 parsers).