Re: Problems with setContentAsDOM if the DOM uses namespaces

Looking further into this problem, this issue arises from the way that
the setContentAsDOM method serialises the DOM node to obtain a text
string.  That serialisation is done with the TextWriter class, which
seems to be a roll-your-own serialisation class that largely ignores
namespace declarations in the serialisation process.  This means that
when the string needs to be parsed as XML, it is not valid XML.

I can get around this easily enough by using the Xerces XML serialiser
as per the method below.

    /**
     * Convert a DOM object to a string.
     * @param dom The DOM object to convert to a string.
     * @return The string that is the serialised content of the DOM
object.
     * @throws XBRLException if an IO exception occurs.
     */
    private String DOM2String(Document node) throws XBRLException {
    try {
        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
org.apache.xml.serialize.OutputFormat format = new
org.apache.xml.serialize.OutputFormat("xml", "UTF-8", true);
org.apache.xml.serialize.XMLSerializer output = new
org.apache.xml.serialize.XMLSerializer(sw, format);
output.setNamespaces(true);
output.serialize(node);
        sw.flush();
        String out = sw.toString();
        sw.close();
        return out;
    } catch (IOException e) {
    ...
    }
    
    }

This seems to handle all of the namespace issues nicely enough (though I
have not tested passing in any DOM node rather than passing in a
Document node), leaving open the question: why not use this (or the
Xalan 2.7 serialiser when it is released next month [the 2.6 Xalan
serialiser has some namespace issues of its own]) instead of using the
TextWriter class?

Cheers

Geoff Shuetrim


On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 19:01 +1000, Geoffrey Shuetrim wrote:
> I am using the setContentAsDOM method provided by XMLResource instances
> to specify the content that I wish to insert into an Xindice database
> but am running into problems if the DOM object that is provided as an
> argument has had nodes created using the createElementNS or
> setAttributeNS methods.
> 
> The attached source code provides two JUnit tests.  One works because it
> does not have namespace declarations for the nodes in the document.  The
> other fails because it does.  The tests assume that the database URI is:
> xmldb:xindice://localhost:8180/db
> 
> The problem occurs at the point where the database manager attempts to
> insert the XMLResource into the relevant collection, complaining about
> difficulties parsing the document.
> 
> My environment is as follows:
> 
> OS: Debian testing
> Container: tomcat 4
> Xindice: 1.1b4
> 
> Any insights into what is going wrong would be very much appreciated.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Geoff Shuetrim
>