XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems

8.6. Uploading XML Documents

In order to upload XML files, we need a program that can read them, understand the content model, discern content from syntax, and set the x and y coordinates of each node. Fortunately, the XML community has done almost all of the hard work for us already. The Simple API for XML (SAX) provides methods for sequential parsing of XML files, so all we will need to do is write methods to handle the various events that the SAX parser will invoke as it steps through the file. Some features of SAX are worth noting here. A SAX parser understands the XML content model and acts as an XML processor (i.e., it has some intelligence built into it)—by default, the SAX ContentHandler will parse entity references, ignore comments, ...