Question

I’m trying to extend an existing XML file and add a new node. I’m loading the XML containing a lot of products, add a new one and save it.

I’m using Nokogiri and Ruby 1.9.3.

This is the best that I created:

builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do
  root do
    load_xml = Nokogiri::XML(IO.read("test.xml"))
    parent.add_child(load_xml.root)
    data do
      name "Name"
    end
  end
end

file = File.open("test.xml",'w')
file.puts builder.to_xml
file.close

Answer 1

Nokogiri::XML::Builder is actually only used when creating new XML-Files, not when editing them.

Also your code loads the XML and puts it into a new root-Node (root) while it appends a new child (the data-node) to it. Is this really the desired behaviour?

Normally you would do adding a node like this:

doc = Nokogiri::XML(IO.read("test.xml"))
name_node = Nokogiri::XML::Node.new("name",doc)
name_node.content = "Name"
data_node = Nokogiri::XML::Node.new("data",doc)
data_node.add_child(name_node)
doc.root.add_child(data_node)

file = File.open("test.xml",'w')
file.puts doc.to_xml
file.close

This is without creating a new root node, because this seems a little bit
peculiar to me…

Also you might want to try the Nokogiri-Documentation, it is fairly extensive.

There are other ways, which would use Nokogiri::XML::Builder to create everything downside from and including data, this would be an example for this combined approach:

builder = Nokogiri::XML::Builder.new do
  data do 
    name "Name"
  end
end
doc = Nokogiri::XML(IO.read("test.xml"))
doc.root.add_child builder.doc.root

file = File.open("test.xml",'w')
file.puts doc.to_xml
file.close