Question

I’m writing an app for android that needs to parse data from an XML file. I’ve never come across an error like this that is so impossibly hard to track down. Or maybe my brain just stopped working. That happens. XML file is of the form:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<memberRoster>
    <agent>
        <agentInfo1>...</agentInfo1>
        <agentInfo2>...</agentInfo2>
        ...
    </agent>
    <agent>
        ...
    </agent>
    ...
</memberRoster>

So far it’s working well, except for some random bits of fun!

Every now and then it will throw a NullPointerException. I did some more digging and found out that there are THREE “agents” (out of 800) with “supposedly” null data. I checked the XML file and the data is there, there are no illegal characters, etc. It is the same three “agents” every time. The program parses other entries before and after these “null” “agents”. Also of note is that not all “agentInfo” fields in the ArrayList come up null; example, one of the entries has 7 of the 8 entries as null, with the 8th one non-null, another has only one null with the last 7 non-null.

I’m parsing the data in to an ArrayList from the XML file, and like I mentioned before, it works flawlessly until it comes to those three specific entries in the XML file.

I’m sorry I can’t give much more info than that, the data is sensitive to our members.

EDIT:

Sorry! I knew I was forgetting something! 🙂

Some code from my XMLHandler.java class:

public void characters(char[] ch, int start, int length)

    if(this.in_mr_agentNrdsId) {
        agent[0] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentFirstName) {
        agent[1] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentLastName) {
        agent[2] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentPhone) {
        agent[3] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentEmail) {
        agent[4] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentOfficeName) {
        agent[5] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentOfficePhone) {
        agent[6] = ch.toString();
    }
    else if(this.in_mr_agentType) {
        agent[7] = ch.toString();
        pds.setMemberRoster(agent);
        agent = new String[8];
    }

PDS is an object of type ParsedDataSet, which is just a simple class containing the ArrayList objects and a few getter and setter methods:


public class ParsedDataSet {
private ArrayList agentOpenHouses = new ArrayList();
private ArrayList calendarOfEvents = new ArrayList();
private ArrayList latestStatistics = new ArrayList();
private ArrayList memberRoster = new ArrayList();

public ArrayList<String[]> getAgentOpenHouses() {
    return agentOpenHouses;
}

public ArrayList<String[]> getCalendarOfEvents() {
    return calendarOfEvents;
}

public ArrayList<String[]> getLatestStatistics() {
    return latestStatistics;
}

public ArrayList<String[]> getMemberRoster() {
    return memberRoster;
}

public void setAgentOpenHouses(String[] agentOpenHousesItem) {
    this.agentOpenHouses.add(agentOpenHousesItem);
}

public void setCalendarOfEvents(String[] calendarOfEventsItem) {
    this.calendarOfEvents.add(calendarOfEventsItem);
}

public void setLatestStatistics(String[] latestStatisticsItem) {
    this.latestStatistics.add(latestStatisticsItem);
}

public void setMemberRoster(String[] memberRosterItem) {
    this.memberRoster.add(memberRosterItem);
}

} // end class ParsedDataSet


Answer 1

You could throw an if statement into your assignements and reassign any caught ‘NULL’ or empty strings into a zero value or just reassign as variable = “” in your code.

For example:

if (agentInfo1 == NULL) {
    agentInfo1 = "" || agentInfo1 = 0; //Depending on what your variables are
}