XML handling in Java

[Nitin Mehhta]

I'm facing a problem for which I am unable to find a correct solution. I have a XML file which I read into memory and make a DOM (using validating parser). Now I start removing certain nodes from the DOM. I want to check that each Node removal is not causing the document to be invalid against the DTD. I want to check this as and when i'm removing the nodes and if the document is becoming invalid because of theremoval then I do not want to remove the node. The only way I can think of achieving that right now is removing each node then writing the file back and again validating it by parsing through a validating parser. But that will hit the performance a lot. Can anyone suggest a better alternate, I'm sure they would be a better way.

Thanks in advance.
Nitin

[Nitin Mehhta]

Just to add to my question, I know such a dynamic validation is possible in DOM3 but the environment I am using is DOM2 jdk1.4_2

[Jaikiran Pai]

With the DOM2 standard API, there is unfortunately no way to revalidate an XML document. You can however serialize the document to text, then reparse it. However, this will have performance problems

[Ulf Dittmer]

It is possible to use DOM 3 with Java 1.4.2 if you have a DOM3-compliant XML parser like Xerces 2.7. See here and here on how to do that.