Question

Following suggestions on this site, I have adopted SimpleXML from org.simpleframework.xml.
I use this code to deserialize my class from a file on disk:

      try {
            myPoints = serial.read(Points.class, new File(getFilesDir(), "points.xml"));
            Log.i(TAG, "Number of Points: " + myPoints.getSize());
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            Log.d(TAG, "No data found!");
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.d(TAG, "Uncaught exception: ", e.getMessage());
        }

In the event the contents of file “points.xml” is not legal xml (in my case it’s an empty file), serial.read breaks (an exception occurs in Persister.class, sorry I don’t have simplexml sources…).
Should I check for xml consistency beforehand?
Can anybody help?

Answer 1

No need to validate before-hand since you won’t be able to fix the problem. Just make sure it fails gracefully (as your code appears to be doing).

You may, however, want to see if the file is empty or not in the case of a deserialization error. An empty file is likely not a problem where as a malformed XML file is!