Question

I asked this question in a different format and XSLT was mentioned but don’t think I explained the solution I need. I have two xml files and using Java and I am trying to write a program that will accept a source and target xml file and for the most part they will have the same structure except the source will have some new elements added and I need to figure out how I can navigate the source DOM and if an element is not found in the target then add it or at this point even just have the program output what elements are not found in the target file making it easier to manually modify the target file. Does anyone know of a utility where I can do something like this and just get a list of elements not found in the target xml file. Am I correct to use a DOM parser vs. SAX. I need help on this, have to write it today and have about 50 xml files to merge!

Am I thinking in line with the idea of navigating the entire source DOM for each node or element get the full path like people/person/john and then on my target DOM somehow test to see if that node exists? Does this sound more like DOM or a SAX parsing paradigm?

Answer 1

it seems like your problem is much simpler then that.

1. parse source into DOM
2. parse dest into DOM
3. traverse source and dest in a depth first search in parallel
4. whenever you hit something in source missing in dest, add it (as mentioned in the comments, one easy way to do this is Document.importNode())