Creating Blank DOM Document

This tutorial shows you how to create blank DOM document. JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) is a Java interface that provides a standard approach to Parsing XML documents. With JAXP, we will use the Document BuilderFactory to create DocumentBuilder class.

The class DocumentBuilderFactory is responsible for creating new DOM parsers. Normally it is used to a DOM parser. Example is as follows:


 DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
 DocumentBuilder parser = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
 Document doc = parser.parse(myInputSource); //The parse function is used to parse existing xml document.
 

DocumentBuilderFactory uses the system property javax.xml.parsers.XmlDocumentParserFactory to find the class to load. So you can change the parser by calling:
 System.setProperty("javax.xml.parsers.XmlDocumentParserFactory",
                    "com.foo.myFactory");

The instance of the class DocumentBuilder is used to create a blank document. The newDocument() method of the class returns a blank DOM document.

Document doc = parser.newDocument();

Here is the full code of CreateBlankDocument.java

In the next section I will show you how to add root and child elements to the blank document. Saving the DOM tree to the disk file is also discussed in the next secion.