Creating DOM Child Elements

This lesson shows you how to create root and child elements in the DOM tree. We will first create a blank DOM document and add the root element to it. Then I show you how to add comment element and then child element to the root element. In this example following xml code will generated and displayed on the console.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<root>

<Child attribute1="The value of Attribute 1" />
</root>

Creating the root element

In the previous lesson you learned how to create DocumentBuilder object and the create a blank DOM document. The following code creates a blank document.

//Create blank DOM Document
Document doc = docBuilder.newDocument();

The createElement function is used to create the root element and appendChild method is used to append the element to the DOM document.

//create the root element
Element root = doc.createElement("root");
//all it to the xml tree
doc.appendChild(root);

Adding Comment Element to DOM Tree

The doc.createComment function is used to create Comment object.

//create a comment
Comment comment = doc.createComment("This is comment");
//add in the root element
root.appendChild(comment);

Here is the video insturction "How to add child element in XML (dom) using Java?":

Adding Child Element to DOM Tree

The doc.createElement function is used to create Child element.

//create child element
Element childElement = doc.createElement("Child");
//Add the atribute to the child
childElement.setAttribute("attribute1","The value of Attribute 1");
root.appendChild(childElement);

Printing the DOM Tree on console

An finally we will print the DOM tree on the console with the following code:

TransformerFactory tranFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer aTransformer = tranFactory.newTransformer();

Source src = new DOMSource(doc);
Result dest = new StreamResult(System.out);
aTransformer.transform(src, dest);

Here is the full code of CreateDomXml.java


import org.w3c.dom.*;
 
 import javax.xml.parsers.*; 
 import javax.xml.transform.*; 
 import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource; 
 import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult; 
 
 
 class CreateDomXml 
 {
   public static void main(String[] args) 
   {
   try{
   //Create instance of DocumentBuilderFactory
   DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
   //Get the DocumentBuilder
   DocumentBuilder docBuilder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
   //Create blank DOM Document
   Document doc = docBuilder.newDocument();
 
   //create the root element
   Element root = doc.createElement("root");
   //all it to the xml tree
   doc.appendChild(root);
   
   //create a comment
   Comment comment = doc.createComment("This is comment");
   //add in the root element
   root.appendChild(comment);
 
   //create child element
   Element childElement = doc.createElement("Child");
   //Add the atribute to the child
   childElement.setAttribute("attribute1","The value of Attribute 1");
   root.appendChild(childElement);
   
 
   TransformerFactory tranFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance(); 
   Transformer aTransformer = tranFactory.newTransformer(); 
 
   Source src = new DOMSource(doc); 
   Result dest = new StreamResult(System.out); 
   aTransformer.transform(src, dest); 
 
 
   }catch(Exception e){
   System.out.println(e.getMessage());
   }
 
 
   }
 }

Download source code of the project in Eclipse Project format.

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Creating DOM Child Elements

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