Adding Elements

Elements in XML are the same as tags. This example will create a document and add some elements to it.

Resulting XML
<top> <a/> <b/> <c/> </top>

All the DOM nodes are created using the Document object. Each node created by a Document belongs to that document. You can't directly add nodes from one document to another document. (Although you can import the node.)

Documents are intrinsically implementation-dependent. To bootstrap this process, you need to create the Document. Sun's JAXP DocumentBuilder gives an implementation-independent method for creating a document.

Creating Elements with the DOM

import java.io.*;
import javax.xml.parser.*;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import com.caucho.xml.*;

...

// Create a new parser using the JAXP API (javax.xml.parser)
DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();

// Create a new document
Document doc = builder.newDocument();

// Create the top element
Element top = doc.createElement("top");

// Add it to the document
doc.appendChild(top);

// Add elements to the top
top.appendChild(doc.createElement("a"));
top.appendChild(doc.createElement("b"));
top.appendChild(doc.createElement("c"));