Hello,
  back in my ASP days, I got very accustomed to the MSXML objects, and the joy of being able to pull a node out of a document simply by using docObj.selectNodes("/Data/My/Xpath[@id='4']").

  This is great, because you can then use XML for data files, config files and all sorts of loveliness.

  Now I use Java.

  While I have written myself nice classes for validating and transforming XML documents, I have failed to find any exising examples of how to travel around a Document in a java program using XPath. The closest I have found is getElementsByTagName but this is pretty arbitrary, and if, for example, I have a XML document containing 500 individual people, I would have 500 elements called 'FirstName' and 500 called 'LastName' and I would not want to trawl through these manually looking for String matches.

Any ideas, or do I have to write my own XPath class?

holdmykidney

Firstly, I'd suggest that in Java you consider using JDOM or XOM rather than the DOM, they are much easier to work with, and much more Java-friendly.

Secondly, for any of these object models you'll find a number of XPath processors available. Saxon, for example, offers a Java API that will access DOM or JDOM trees. The XPath processor may come from a different source than the object model implementation.

There's a standard XPath API coming along in JDK 1.5 that's designed to work with any document model, but not everyone supports it yet (it's very new).



Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

That is exactly what I was looking for - thank you!

holdmykidney