Question

When writing in java the following:

Element fieldEl = targetDocument.createElement("field");
fieldEl.setAttribute("Wine","Marlo");
fieldEl.setAttribute("Beer","Corona");

The order of adding the attributes are not kept in the result XML file.
How can I control the order of the attribute inside XML Element (so it will be easy for human being to read…) ??

Answer 1

There is no defined order for attribute nodes according to the DOM standard:

Objects implementing the NamedNodeMap interface are used to represent collections of nodes that can be accessed by name. Note that NamedNodeMap does not inherit from NodeList; NamedNodeMaps are not maintained in any particular order. Objects contained in an object implementing NamedNodeMap may also be accessed by an ordinal index, but this is simply to allow convenient enumeration of the contents of a NamedNodeMap, and does not imply that the DOM specifies an order to these Nodes.

(emphasis added) and neither in the XML standard:

Note that the order of attribute specifications in a start-tag or empty-element tag is not significant.

I don’t think, that many DOM implementations support ordering of attributes at all. You’d have to write your own serialization mechanism in order to achieve ordering (no pun intended).