Home/ Questions/Q 6982331
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-27T18:16:26+00:00

I have an XML file of the following structure: <?xml version=1.0 encoding=utf-8?> <root> <ArrayOfLocationDTO

  • 0

I have an XML file of the following structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<root>
<ArrayOfLocationDTO xmlns:xsi="foo1" xmlns:xsd="foo2" xmlns="foo3">
<LocationDTO ~some data~>~child nodes etc~</LocationDTO>
<LocationDTO ~some data~>~child nodes etc~</LocationDTO>
... ... ...
<LocationDTO ~some data~>~child nodes etc~</LocationDTO>
<LocationDTO ~some data~>~child nodes etc~</LocationDTO>
</ArrayOfLocationDTO>
</root>

I’m trying to grab all ‘LocationDTO’ from there. My code looks like that:

XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
DocumentBuilderFactory builderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
builderFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
DocumentBuilder builder = builderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
File XMLPath=new File(Environment.getExternalStorageDirectory(), "XMLSource.xml");
Document document = builder.parse(XMLPath);
NodeList nodes = (NodeList) xpath.evaluate("//LocationDTO", document, XPathConstants.NODESET);
int count=nodes.getLength();

My problem is that the code finds nothing unless I remove ‘ArrayOfLocationDTO’ manually from XML source.
Why ArrayOfLocationDTO prevents my code from working properly and how can I make it work without programmatical removal of ArrayOfLocationDTO (I consider the latter a sort of ‘dirty solution’)?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    ArrayOfLocationDTO has an attribute xmlns=”foo3″. This attribute is one of the very few XML attributes that have a special meaning: specifically it means that ArrayOfLocationDTO and each tag inside it has a namespace “foo3” (each XML tag has a local name and – optionally – a namespace – which is a string introduced by one of xmlns syntaxes).

    This means that your document has NO tag of name “LocationDTO”. “LocationDTO” is only a local part of the name.

    You have two choices:

    • find tags by their local names, using function local-name: //*[local-name()=’LocationDTO’]; this is by far the quickest solution in your case (a simple search, small document, a single namespace)

    • establish a namespace context (using, if I remember correctly, setNamespaceContext) that binds “foo3” to an arbitrary prefix (eg. “f”) and use the query: //f:LocationDTO

    • 0