Hi,
Using dom4j 1.4, I've made a little convenient class to parse and update XML
documents, which eventually would be written to a file. While testing it, I happened
on a very strange behaviour at first glance :
I created a simple XML document through the DocumentHelper class, with some Elements
and Attributes in it. Then I tried to add a new "<test-new>" Element instance 4 times
at several locations of the Document through XPath, which works fine : the
corresponding XML file is updated correctly, and the String representation of the
Document (through OutputFormat, StringWriter and XMLWriter) is correct.
Now when I search all <test-new> Elements (through document.selectNodes("//test-new"))
inside the Document object in memory (i.e. without re-parsing from the corresponding
file !) : only one Element is returned in the List, with path "/test-new", which is
wrong by the way (I didn't replace the root Element with <test-new>). And the 3 other
<test-new> elements are simply ignored !
After some more tests I figured out that adding the same Element instance to the
document at several locations wasn't the best solution. Apparently I need to clone()
that instance every time I want to add it. OR, the other solution was to re-parse the
Document from the XML file (after I had inserted the same <test-new> Element several
times in the Document and wrote it to the file), so that a new Document tree was
created again, and the selectNodes() method would return the 4 <test-new> Elements
correctly. But this would cost too much in performance of course...
My questions are : is there something wrong with my experiments and conclusions above ?
Is there another way to add the same Element instance several times inside a document
without having to clone it every time ?
Thanks for your help. I hope everything was clear in my explanations.
Regards,
Alain
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