Question

I have the follwing XML file –

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<BatchOrders xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <BatchHeader>
     <ServiceProvider>123456789</ServiceProvider>
     </BatchHeader>
   <OrderDetails>
     <MessageType>HelloWorld</MessageType>
  <IssueDateTime>22/01/2012 00:00:00</IssueDateTime> 
  <receivedDateTime>22/01/2012 00:00:00</receivedDateTime> 
     <Status>TestStatus</Status>
  </OrderDetails>
  </BatchOrders>

I want to read in the contents and set them to fields I have created. So I have the following code below (not some is omitted – I have just included what I think I need to show. The below is in a test class which I have created – I also have a writer as part of this class that writes an XML File fine to disk as I expect. The problem I am facing is reading the file above and displaying the contents read to the Console just for now.

File        myFileRead = null;
FileReader  myFileReader = null;

try {

myFileRead    = new File("C:/Path/myfile.xml");
myRecord = new myRecord();
myFileReader = new FileReader(myFileRead);

myXPathReader reader = new myXPathReader(myFileReader);

while (reader.hasNext())
{
       record = reader.next();

//prints out then to cosole
}

So from above I have the myRecord class where I have the getters/setters for e.g ServiceProvider, etc. I also then have a class for myXpathReader which does the following:

    private Document document;
    private List     batchorders;
    private Iterator iterator;

    public myXPathReader (Reader myFileReader)
    throws Exception 
    {
        SAXBuilder builder = new SAXBuilder();
        document = builder.build(myFileReader);      

        batchorders = new JDOMXPath("//BatchOrders").selectNodes(document);

        iterator = batchorders.iterator();
    }

   public int getSize() { return batchorders.size(); }

   public boolean hasNext() { return iterator.hasNext(); }


   public myRecord next() 
    throws Exception {

        Element element = (Element) iterator.next();


        myRecord record = new myRecord();

      record.setServiceProvider((new JDOMXPath("./ServiceProvider").stringValueOf(element)));
      //Some more sets ans close class etc...

Now if I debug the code and after the element on iterator.next I can see the file contents have being read in correctly. But on my console the ServiceProvider value and in fact all the values are getting set to empty string “”. Am I doing something incorrect on the JDOMXPath in order to pull the value from the XML?

Answer 1

In your example XML ServiceProvider is not a child of BatchOrders, there’s another level (BatchHeader) in between. So your second XPath expression should probably be

BatchHeader/ServiceProvider

instead of ./ServiceProvider