JavaServer Pages, 3rd Edition

Parsing XML Data

Before you can access the XML data with the JSTL XML actions, the imported document must be parsed and converted to a data structure the actions can read. That’s what the <x:parse> action does (see Table 15-3).

Table 15-3. Attributes for JSTL <x:parse>

Attribute name	Java type	Dynamic value accepted	Description
doc	String or java.io.Reader	Yes	Mandatory, unless specified as the body. The XML document to parse.
systemId	String	Yes	Optional. The system identifier for the XML document.
filter	org.xml.sax.XMLFilter	Yes	Optional. An XMLFilter to be applied to the XML document.
var	String	No	Optional. The name of the variable to hold the result as an implementation-dependent type.
scope	String	No	Optional. The scope for the variable, one of page, request, session, or application. page is the default.
varDom	String	No	Optional. The name of the variable to hold the result as a org.w3c.dom.Document.
scopeDom	String	No	Optional. The scope for the DOM variable, one of page, request, session, or application. page is the default.

The XML document to parse can be specified as the body or as a String or Reader variable. In Example 15-3, I use the Reader exposed by the <c:import> action to get the best performance. A base URI for interpretation of relative URIs in the document can be specified by the systemId attribute, the same way as for the <x:transform> action.

The parse result can be saved either as an implementation-dependent data structure ...