This blog is all about me doing nothing serious :): Parsing XML with Commons Digester 2.0

Friday, June 5, 2009

Parsing XML with Commons Digester 2.0

Parsing XMLs with Commons Digester is no longer mystery or new. Probably one of the most easy and convenient way to parse XMLs. For more details, following links can be visited for very detailed explanation on XML parsing using commons digester...

As many occasions, this project of mine required parsing a XML configuration file and for that I took shelter of digester, but this time I upgraded to 2.0 from 1.8. With 2.0, digester provides XML schema validation support using javax.xml.validation.Schema. Below is the code snippet to use XML Schema while parsing the XML for ready reference...

// Load digester rules
Digester digester = DigesterLoader.createDigester( getClass().getClassLoader().getResource( digesterRules ) );

// XML Schema used for XML parsing
URI uri = getClass().getClassLoader().getResource( NOTES_XSD ).toURI();
Schema schema = SchemaFactory.newInstance( XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI ).newSchema( new File( uri ) );
digester.setXMLSchema( schema );
digester.setNamespaceAware( true );
digester.setErrorHandler( myErrorHandler );

// XML file to parse
InputStream stream = getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream( FILE_TO_PARSE );
Object parse = digester.parse( stream );

With this you can get rid of your dependency on DTD and leverage power of XSD type support and better validation.

Cheers !!!
- Jay

3 comments:

Keith02 May, 2010 16:03
can you expound the code parsing a specific sample pojo? and also i don't understand the "DigesterLoader.createDigester" section what object you call "getClass()". Also how did you create the "digesterRules" object. Thanks
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Keith02 May, 2010 16:06
can you expound the code parsing a specific sample pojo? and also i don't understand the "DigesterLoader.createDigester" section what object you call "getClass()". Also how did you create the "digesterRules" object. Thanks
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Jay Khimani03 May, 2010 11:59
@ Keith, I've the digester rules file (digesterRules) in my classpath, which am loading using the classloader of runtime class of the object. This helps me keeping my digester rules as separate configuration and also I can package it with my jar/war/ear. So digesterRules is a simple String which looks something like (com/jak/digester/config/digester-rules.xml)

For full blown example of Digester please visit one of the links I mentioned in the start of my post.
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