Question

Hello all my second question here so be gentle 🙂

I’m still learning java and android, I’m learning it on my little project but I hit kind of logical wall.

I have XML file

<shift_plan>
<plan>
<agent data="John Smith"/>
<date data="6 Jan"/>
<shift data="M-3"/>
</plan>
<plan>
<agent data="John Smith"/>
<date data="7 Jan"/>
<shift data="M-3"/>
</plan>
<plan>
<agent data="John Smith"/>
<date data="8 Jan"/>
<shift data="M-3"/>
</plan>
</shift_plan>

on a web and I want to make a loop that would paste each data to function that put it to db. I have the function and working db so it looks like updateBD(agent, date, shift ) but how would I go about parsing the xml but to parse the 3 variables than put them in that function and than go again for the next 3 etc…until end of xml

I might be not making much sense I know, this must be something very simple I’m sure but I need really kick in the right direction..

Thanks for any answer,
Vlad

Answer 1

Android supports the XmlPullParser API right out of the box. It is an excellent solution for parsing XML documents in Android apps because you can start pulling information from the document right away (it’s a streaming XML parser) and its pull-style API is a lot easier to use than that of a push-style streaming XML parser when all you need to do is parse the document into objects.

I am not sure if this is still true in Android 3 and 4, but the Android 2.3.x and earlier implementation of XmlPullParser (from the Apache Harmony project) does not support getPrefix() or getAttributePrefix(int index). Though, this shouldn’t affect you because you are not using XML namespaces.

EDIT: Examining the git trees corresponding to the platform_frameworks_base tags, it appears that Android 3.2.4 and earlier have the XmlPullParser implementation from the Harmony project whereas beginning with Android 4.0, the implementation switched to kXML2.