Compositional Documents

[Derek Denny-Brown]

The problem with the code below is that the first:
   doc.appendChild( docFrag );
moves the contents of docFrag into doc.  It does not copy/clone or otherwise
duplicate, but rather removes the contents of the document fragment, and
appends them to the list of children of doc.  Before executing that line,
the following would be a true assertion:
    docFrag.getChildNodes().getLength() == 1
after executing that line the following is true
    docFrag.getChildNodes().getLength() == 0

Thus executing the following tidbit after the above
doc.appendChild(docFrag), is an obfuscated no-op.
   doc2.appendChild( docFrag );

-derek

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Berry [mailto:CBerry at works.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 1999 10:11 AM
To: 'xml-dev at ic.ac.uk'
Subject: Compositional Documents


Greetings,
Sorry for the wasted bandwidth, but I posted this last night (without 
a Subject) and did not receive any response.  I'm hoping this time 
around I might be luckier...

I am a relative newbie to XML, so please bear w/ me if this is a poor
question...

It looks like everything in the DOM must be dealt w/ in the context of a
particular document. It seems you cannot drop one Document into another, or
even one DocumentFragment into another Document context. I have tried to do
the following... (using Microsoft's implementation of the DOM) 

   IXMLDOMDocument doc = (IXMLDOMDocument) new DOMDocument();
   IDOMDocumentFragment docFrag = doc.createDocumentFragment();

   IDOMElement userElem = doc.createElement("USER");
   userElem.setAttribute("TIMESTAMP", new Variant("123456") );

   docFrag.appendChild( userElem );

   doc.appendChild( docFrag );
   System.out.println( doc.getXml() );   // >>>> Yields the correct results
               
   IXMLDOMDocument doc2 = (IXMLDOMDocument) new DOMDocument();
   doc2.appendChild( docFrag );
   System.out.println( doc2.getXml() );  // >>>> Yields an empty string

It seems like this should work to me. Shouldn't we be able to cut and paste
between documents?? Or more important, shouldn't we be able to build up
documents compositionally?? I.e. compose Address 1 and Address 2 as
DocumentFragments (or as their own Documents -- with their own DTDs) 
and then drop these into, say, User (providing that the User DTD agrees).

I must be missing something here.
Thanks in advance,
Cheers,
-- Chris

Chris Berry            cberry at works.com          512-231-1341
works.com     6850 Austin Center Blvd.      Austin, TX 78731


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