XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[peter murray-rust <pm286 AT cam.ac.uk>]

At 18:25 05/02/2006, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> XOM's about as consistent on this as it's possible to be given the 
> general mess that is namespaces.

I agree that namespaces are one of the worst specs to come out of the 
process. They were done in a great rush and generated much friction. 
The use of "http://..."; as a name rather than an address is probably 
one of the worst ever decisions.

>  Given any element if you ask for the URI mapped to a given prefix, 
> then it will return the URI as specified by Namespaces in XML.

Agreed. But if I want to ask for the namespaceURIs in scope, rather 
than the prefixes then I don't seem to be able to get them all:


> If you think you've identified a case where this isn't true, then 
> please send in a sample that shows what XOM does report as the 
> namespace URI and what you think it should report instead.

Running under Xom1.12/Junit/Eclipse/Java 5.0:

        public void testNamespaceScope() {
                String s = "<a xmlns:ns='http://foo'><b foo='ns:bar'/></a>";
                Document doc = null;
                try {doc = new Builder().build(new 
StringReader(s));} catch (Exception e) {}
                Element a = doc.getRootElement();
                System.out.println("NS: "+a.getNamespaceURI("ns"));
                Element b = a.getFirstChildElement("b");
                int nsCount = b.getNamespaceDeclarationCount();
                System.out.println("NSCOUNT: "+nsCount);
                for (int i = 0; i < nsCount; i++) {
                        System.out.println("NSPREFIX"+i+" 
["+b.getNamespacePrefix(i)+"]");
                        System.out.println("NSURI"+i+" 
["+b.getNamespaceURI(b.getNamespacePrefix(i))+"]");
                }
                System.out.println("NS1: "+b.getNamespaceURI("ns"));
        }
gives:
NS: http://foo
NSCOUNT: 1
NSPREFIX0 []
NSURI0 []
NS1: http://foo

It seems that the prefix "ns" is not in scope as evidenced by the 
namespace declaration count and there is no other means of iterating 
through the namespaces (which is what I sometimes wish to do as I 
want to see if a namespaceURI is in scope at that stage and I may not 
know its prefix).

Thanks

P.


Peter Murray-Rust
Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics
University of Cambridge,
Lensfield Road,  Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069