Question

To access the values id1 & id2 im iterating over every value in the XML and if I find a tag named id1 or id2 I read its value into a variable. Is there a better method of reading the values id1 & id2 ?

<begin>
  <total>1</total>
  <values>
    <factor>
      <base>test</base>
      <id1>id1</id1>
      <id2>id2</id2>
      <val>val2</val>
      <newval>val1</newval>
    </factor>
  </values>
</begin>

Answer 1

If you use XPath, you can extract values directly from the Document object. In your case, the XPath to get to id1 would be /begin/id1.