On Dec 11, 11:10 am, "Steve W. Jackson" <stevewjack...@knology.net>
wrote:

Thanks, Steve...

I guess the decision to make at this stage is whether the Sun-provided
XML support is enough or if it should be (complemented?, replaced?) by
any of these:

http://java-source.net/open-source/xml-parsers

BTW: Now I am looking for an XML tutorial for javax.xml.

TIA,

-Ramon

You can say that again...

It seems that the harder problem is to ignore about 95% of the
material out there. There are so many ways to skin the proverbial
(XML) cat.

Every piece of code I have seen takes a different approach, with
varying sub-approaches. :-/

I will post a specific question next.

-Ramon

Later on, I might take you up on that offer, Arne. Thanks so much...

Meanwhile, I have a question for the XML crowd. I found a tutorial:

 http://www.totheriver.com/learn/xml/xmltutorial.html#6

which is very close to what I need, with one exception. The tutorial
traverses the XML file below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Personnel>
 <Employee type="permanent">
       <Name>Seagull</Name>
       <Id>3674</Id>
       <Age>34</Age>
  </Employee>
 <Employee type="contract">
       <Name>Robin</Name>
       <Id>3675</Id>
       <Age>25</Age>
   </Employee>
 <Employee type="permanent">
       <Name>Crow</Name>
       <Id>3676</Id>
       <Age>28</Age>
   </Employee>
</Personnel>

and display the fields. Pretty straightforward stuff. In the case
above the tag/field names are known in advance ("Name", "Id", and
"Age"). In my case, those names are not known until run time.

-Ramon

---------------------------------------------------------------

   private Employee getEmployee(Element empEl) {

       //for each <employee> element get text or int values of
       //name ,id, age and name
       // I DO NOT know these names below in advance.
       // How can I retrieve them?. - Ramon
       String name = getTextValue(empEl, "Name");
       int id = getIntValue(empEl, "Id");
       int age = getIntValue(empEl, "Age");

       String type = empEl.getAttribute("type");

       //Create a new Employee with the value read from the xml nodes
       Employee e = new Employee(name, id, age, type);

       return e;
   }

   private void parseDocument() {
       //get the root elememt
       Element docEle = dom.getDocumentElement();

   //get a nodelist of <employee> elements

       // I know the name of this  top element. No problem here -
Ramon
       NodeList nl = docEle.getElementsByTagName("Employee");
       if (nl != null && nl.getLength() > 0) {
           for (int i = 0; i < nl.getLength(); i++) {

               //get the employee element
               Element el = (Element) nl.item(i);

               //get the Employee object
               Employee e = getEmployee(el);

               //add it to list
               myEmpls.add(e);
           }
       }
   }