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  • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>
  • To: xom-interest AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [XOM-interest] insertChild(DocType, 1)
  • Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 12:48:57 -0400

I've noticed something funny about the behavior of the insertChild() method in Document when used to insert a DocType object. Currently, it removes any existing DocType object, which is necessary because a Document can have only one DocType. However, this has an unexpected side effected. Consider this code:

Document doc = new Document(new Element("root"));
doc.insertChild(new DocType("root"), 0);
doc.insertChild(new Comment("Hello!"), 1);
doc.insertChild(new DocType("test"), 2);
System.out.println(doc.indexOf(doc.getDocType()));

This prints 1, not 2 because the insertion also removed the original DocType.

This is a corner case, but it still feels wrong to me. My gut is that insertChild(0 should throw an exception when you try to add a second DocType. It should not silently throw the old one away. replaceChild(oldDocType, newDocType)
would still work, as would inserting a DocType into a Document that does not yet have one.

To make this all slightly easier, I could add a setDocType method to match the current getDocType. This would replace any existing DocType, and probably make the DocType the first child of the Document if none currently existed. This mirrors the behavior of setRootElement. I suspect most users would simply call setDocType and never notice that insertChild() threw an exception. Thoughts?
--

Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA



  • [XOM-interest] insertChild(DocType, 1), Elliotte Rusty Harold, 05/14/2003

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