XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <whoschek AT lbl.gov>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:

> At 5:35 PM -0700 7/17/03, Wolfgang Hoschek wrote:
>
>
>> What's the reason the DOMConverter.convert(xyz) methods are private?
>> It would be handy for my app to be able to convert a DOM element 
into a XOM element, without going through the trouble of making new 
documents and passing them to the public methods that work on entire 
documents.
>
>
>
> You can't create a DOM element without creating  DOM document, at 
least not within DOM. In DOM every element has a document object, and 
cannot be disassociated from that document.


Fine.

> I suppose it might be possible to change a single DOM element to a 
single XOM element, but the reverse is not possible, within the limits 
of DOM. (You could use implementation specific classes, but it's ugly 
and non-portable, and generally breaks every time the DOM vendor updates 
their implementation.) How are you getting elements without documents 
anyway?
>
> That said, if you've got a convincing use case, I could see exposing 
some of the DOM-->XOM methods directly,


All fine, but I'm only interested in a single DOM element from somewhere 
within a DOM document, and need to convert it to XOM (not the rest of it).

The use case involves running an XQuery against the new saxon-7.6.5 API. 
The query returns a list of saxon Items, normally these actually 
implement dom.Element or dom.Document or dom.Attr (it turns out after a 
lot of digging around saxon src), then I convert them to XOM elements, 
attr, etc. and go from there.

I tentatively made convert(Node) and convert(Element) public and added a 
public convert(Attr) and it works fine for me.


> though XOM-->DOM will have to remain private for these reasons.


Fine.

Cheers and congrats again to the neat XOM design.
Wolfgang.

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Wolfgang Hoschek
Distributed Systems Department
Berkeley Laboratory
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