18.2. Structure of XML Classes

18.2.1. Classes for Creating Nodes for the DOM Tree

SophiaFramework provides you with the following 12 types of node classes defined by W3C. These classes inherit from the SFXXMLNode class.

Table 18.1. XML Node Class

Class name	Description	Node Type ( SFXXMLNode::NodeType )
`SFXXMLNode`	Base class for 12 types of node classes	-
`SFXXMLElement`	Class that represents an Element node	ELEMENT_NODE
`SFXXMLAttribute`	Class that represents an Attribute node	ATTRIBUTE_NODE
`SFXXMLText`	Class that represents a Text node	TEXT_NODE
`SFXXMLCDATASection`	Class that represents a CDATASection node	CDATA_SECTION_NODE
`SFXXMLEntityReference`	Class that represents an Entity Reference node	ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE
`SFXXMLEntity`	Class that represents an Entity node	ENTITY_NODE
`SFXXMLProcessingInstruction`	Class that represents a Processing Instruction node	PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE
`SFXXMLComment`	Class that represents a Comment node	COMMENT_NODE
`SFXXMLDocument`	Class that represents a Document node	DOCUMENT_NODE
`SFXXMLDocumentType`	Class that represents a DocumentType node	DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE
`SFXXMLDocumentFragment`	Class that represents a DocumentFragment node	DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE
`SFXXMLNotation`	Class that represents a Notation node	NOTATION_NODE

Figure 18.1. DOM Tree of the SFXXMLNode nodes

18.2.2. Basic Function of SFXXMLNode

The following are provided as basic functions of the SFXXMLNode class.

Table 18.2. Function to get a node from the DOM tree

Function Name	Description
GetFirstChild	get the first child node
GetLastChild	get the last child node
GetNextSibling	get the next node amongst brothers
GetPreviousSibling	get the previous node amongst brothers
GetParentNode	get the parent node

Table 18.3. Function to create or update the DOM tree

Function Name	Description
AppendChild	append a child node
RemoveChild	remove a child node
ReplaceChild	replace a child node
InsertBefore	insert a node
CloneNode	clone a node（It is possible to copy a node including child node trees）

Table 18.4. Function to get or set the node attribute

Function Name	Description
HasChildNodes	test if it has a child node
GetChildNodes	get all the child nodes
GetNodeType	get a node type
GetNodeName	get a node name
SetNodeValue	set node contents
GetText	get texts included in all the child nodes
SetText	set a text into its child node

Table 18.5. Function to compare nodes

Function Name	Description
IsSameNode	test if two nodes are same
EqualNode	test if two nodes are equal

18.2.3. Structure of the DOM Tree

An XML parser receives XML documents grammatically checked by DTD or XML Schema, expands the documents onto memory as tree-structured objects ( DOM tree ), and sends them to an application.

Figure 18.2. Process Flow on XML parser

In SophiaFramework, a DOM parser ( SFXXMLDOMParser / SFXXSDDOMParser ) is created to analyze XML document, and return an DOM tree of SFXXMLDocument.

Figure 18.3. Sequence Diagram

	SFXXMLScanner
	SFXXMLScanner is the class used by SophiaFramework.

Figure 18.4. SFXXMLDocument

The most important object in parsing XML document is the root node of SFXXMLDocument in the DOM tree.

Basic Functions of "SFXXMLDocument"

get, create, update, and compare the nodes of the DOM tree
create a new node type
save a XML document
get any node of the DOM tree as Helper function