Parsing XML data to user defined objects, SAX or DOM

Question

I want to create a simple function as follow:

vector <User> convertXMLDataToUserList (string xmlData) { …. }

Let's say that the xmlData is something as follow:

<users>
    <user>
        <firstname>ABC</firstname>
        <lastname>DEF</lastname>
        <!-- …… other attributes -->
    </user>
    <user>
        <firstname>ABC</firstname>
        <lastname>DEF</lastname>
        <!-- …… other attributes -->
    </user>
    <!-- …… More users -->
</users>

I need to parse these xmlData into a collection of User objects. I want to use the QtXML library to handle this. Which XML parsing approach be better to handle this, DOM or SAX, and why is that?

Of course the xml data content will not be limited to user attributes as mentioned above, but it can contain other various elements too. Any example / tutorial links on parsing xml data to user defined objects will be really helpful (using QtXML library).

Answer 1

read this first and choose whatever you want to use accordingly

XML parsing Tuesday, November 6, 2012 · Posted in android project, dom parsing, dom parsing code, parsing, response parsing, sax parsing, sax parsing code, source code, web service code, web service parsing, xml, xml parsing, xmlpull parsing

JAXP:

JAXP stands for Java API for xml processing. It is a specification from w3c. JAXP is an API from SUN.

using JAXP api, we can process xml document in two mthods. DOM: Stores the entire xml document into memory before processing. It occupies more amount of memory. It traverse in any direction. Tree data structure

Steps to work with DOM:

1. Create documentBuilderFactory

   DocumentBuilderFactory factory= DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();

2. Create DocumentBuilder

   DocumentBuilder builder=factory. newDocumentBuilder();

   1. get input stream ClassLoader cls=DomReader.class.getClassLoader(); InputStream is=cls.getResourceAsStream("xml file"); 4. parse xml file and get Document object by calling parse method on DocumentBuilder object. Document document=builder.parse(is); 5. Traverse dom tree using document object.SAX: Simple xml parsing. It parses node by node Traversing is from top to bottom Low memory usage Back navigation is not possible with sax.

   //implementing required handlers public class SaxParse extends DefaultHandler{ } //new instance of saxParserFactory SAXParserFactory factory=SAXParserFactory.newInstance(); //NEW INSTANCE OF SAX PARSER SAXParser saxparser=factory.newSAXParser(); //Parsing xml document SAXParser.parse(new File(file to be parsed), new SAXXMLParserImpl());