CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaxstream
Ananda
Ananda

Reputation: 1572

xstream: only parsing child element

I have following xml

<root>
<child-1>
</child-1>
<child-2>
   <subchild-21>
   </subchild-22>
</child-2>
</root>

My requirement is such that I only want to parse child-2. I am unaware of root and child-1.

Is it possible with xstream because I couldn't find a way to ignore root.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 850

Answers (2)

Memophysic
Memophysic

Reputation: 157

There are several ways to go, depending on your requirements.

If you know the name of the class to parse (child-2 here), you could look for the <child-2> and </child-2> entry in the XML, copy them along with the content in-between to a new temporary XML file (you can create temporary files using createTempFile() from the standard File class). This is the way I would suggest.

If you want to take out the child-2 instance without knowing its name, but you know the names of the surrounding classes, you could mock their classes, that is create classes of the same name, but without their specific content. In your example there is no content (might have been ignored at export time), but it's important to have the same member data in the mock classes for the import to succeed. (unless you use ignoreUnknownElements() as stated by Philipi Willemann)

Of course, if you're the one creating the XML, you should be able to export only the child-2 instance in the first place.

Upvotes: 1

Philipi Willemann
Philipi Willemann

Reputation: 658

If you know the root name you can create a simple class has an attribute of the class you have mapped to child-2:

@XStreamAlias("root")
class Root {
    @XStreamAlias("child-2")
    private Child2 child;

    //get and set
}

Then when you are processing the XML you can set XStream to ignore unknown elements with xstream.ignoreUnknownElements();

Upvotes: 0

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