Java Doc for XMLConfiguration.java in  » Library » Apache-commons-configuration-1.4-src » org » apache » commons » configuration » Java Source Code / Java DocumentationJava Source Code and Java Documentation

A specialized hierarchical configuration class that is able to parse XML documents.

The parsed document will be stored keeping its structure. The class also tries to preserve as much information from the loaded XML document as possible, including comments and processing instructions. These will be contained in documents created by the save() methods, too.

Like other file based configuration classes this class maintains the name and path to the loaded configuration file. These properties can be altered using several setter methods, but they are not modified by save() and load() methods. If XML documents contain relative paths to other documents (e.g. to a DTD), these references are resolved based on the path set for this configuration.

By inheriting from AbstractConfiguration this class provides some extended functionaly, e.g. interpolation of property values. Like in PropertiesConfiguration property values can contain delimiter characters (the comma ',' per default) and are then splitted into multiple values. This works for XML attributes and text content of elements as well. The delimiter can be escaped by a backslash. As an example consider the following XML fragment:

 <config>
 <array>10,20,30,40</array>
 <scalar>3\,1415</scalar>
 <cite text="To be or not to be\, this is the question!"/>
 </config>
 

Here the content of the array element will be splitted at the commas, so the array key will be assigned 4 values. In the scalar property and the text attribute of the cite element the comma is escaped, so that no splitting is performed.

XMLConfiguration implements the FileConfiguration interface and thus provides full support for loading XML documents from different sources like files, URLs, or streams. A full description of these features can be found in the documentation of AbstractFileConfiguration .