Question

I get a SOAP message from a web service, and I can convert the response string to an XML file using the below code. This works fine. But my requirement is not to write the SOAP message to a file. I just need to keep this XML document object in memory, and extract some elements to be used in further processing. However, if I just try to access the document object below, it comes as empty.

Can somebody please tell me how I can convert a String to an in-memory XML object (without having to write to a file)?

String xmlString = new String(data); 
DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();  

DocumentBuilder builder;  
try  
{  
    builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();  

    // Use String reader  
    Document document = builder.parse( new InputSource(  
            new StringReader( xmlString ) ) );  

    TransformerFactory tranFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();  
    Transformer aTransformer = tranFactory.newTransformer();  
    Source src = new DOMSource( document );  

    Result dest = new StreamResult( new File( "xmlFileName.xml" ) );  
    aTransformer.transform( src, dest );

}

Answer 1

Remove the 5 last lines of code, and you’ll just have the DOM document in memory. Store this document in some field, rather than in a local variable.

If that isn’t sufficient, then please explain, with code, what you mean with “if I just try to access the document object below, it comes as empty”.