Working with the DOM Tree

DOM Level 2 is a W3C Recommendation for XML interfaces that maps the constituents of an XML document to a tree structure. The specification of DOM Level 2 can be found at http://www.w3.org/DOM/.

Introduction to DOM

DOM provides an interface to access and change the content and structure of an XML file. It makes a hierarchical view of the document (a tree view). Thus -- in contrast to the SAX2 interface -- an object model of the document is resident in memory after parsing which makes manipulation easy.

All DOM nodes in the document tree are subclasses of QDomNode. The document itself is represented as a QDomDocument object.

Here are the available node classes and their potential child classes:

QDomDocument: Possible children are
- QDomElement (at most one)
- QDomProcessingInstruction
- QDomComment
- QDomDocumentType
QDomDocumentFragment: Possible children are
QDomDocumentType: No children
QDomEntityReference: Possible children are
QDomElement: Possible children are
QDomAttr: Possible children are
- QDomText
- QDomEntityReference
QDomProcessingInstruction: No children
QDomComment: No children
QDomText: No children
QDomCDATASection: No children
QDomEntity: Possible children are
QDomNotation: No children

With QDomNodeList and QDomNamedNodeMap two collection classes are provided: QDomNodeList is a list of nodes, and QDomNamedNodeMap is used to handle unordered sets of nodes (often used for attributes).

The QDomImplementation class allows the user to query features of the DOM implementation.

To get started please refer to the QDomDocument documentation. You might also want to take a look at the DOM Bookmarks example, which illustrates how to read and write an XML bookmark file (XBEL) using DOM.

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Contents

Working with the DOM Tree

Introduction to DOM