XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>]

At 11:23 AM -0400 7/7/03, John Cowan wrote:

> >  I've been playing with the API, and I think something John suggested
> >  here is likely to work. First I'll rename makeElement to
> >  beginMakeElement and endElement to finishMakeElement. (Would
> >  beginMakingElement and finishMakingElement be more grammatical? or
> >  perhaps startMakingElement and finishMakingElement?)
>
> I like the last pair best.  ("Start" goes with "finish", "begin" with "end").

I think I do too. Unless there's a lot of screaming, 
startMakingElement and finishMakingElement it is. It's a little 
wordy, but this is an advanced part of XOM many users won't see, and 
very few users will need to type this more than once. I think 
developers will mostly just override it, not invoke it directly.


> I thought about suggesting this, but decided not to do so for the reason
> you give below: the rest of the tree is unavailable.  The importance
> of this is that whether you want to skip a node often depends directly
> on what the current context is, which is most easily discovered in the
> XOM context by poking about in the tree.  An obvious use case would be
> deciding to discard detail elements based on the container element.

It now seems simplest to just have endElement remove the entire node 
on returning null. No explicit detachment will be required (or 
allowed). That way the parent will always be available.

> You could get the best of both worlds by simply passing the presumptive
> parent node as an argument to startMakingElement.

finishMakingElement will now provide parent nodes for applications 
that want context via element.getParent(). I wonder, though, if I 
should pass parent nodes to everything; i.e what's the parent of this 
comment? this text? My gut is no, it shouldn't It makes the class too 
complex, especially for its original use-case of selecting different 
subclasses of the core XOM classes. If somebody really wants that 
extra context, they can store a stack of parent nodes in the factory 
as they're created.
--

  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