JDOM AddException when adding nodes to an XML document

[Iain Emsley]

Hi,
I'm trying to use JDOM to convert some letters into XML. I can get the structure for the XML header, author tag and the whole letter into a tag, i.e
<author>hogarth<ln>text of the letter</ln></author> but what I want to do is to have each line attached to a node like <author>hogarth<ln>line 1</ln><ln>line 2</ln>...& so on</author>. However I keep getting the error message:
org.jdom.IllegalAddException: The Content already has an existing parent "author"
at org.jdom.ContentList.add(ContentList.java:209)
at org.jdom.ContentList.add(ContentList.java:131)
at java.util.AbstractList.add(Unknown Source)
at org.jdom.Element.addContent(Element.java:811)
at uk.co.austgate.xml.jdbcXml.toDocument(jdbcXml.java:38)

My code is:

   
	public Document toDocument(ResultSet rs) throws SQLException {
    
		Element e = new Element("text");
		Document doc = new Document(e);
		
		Element author = new Element("author");
		Element txtLn = new Element("ln");
		
		parseLetter pLetter = new parseLetter();

		while (rs.next()) {
			
			String correspondent = rs.getString("correspondent");
			e.addContent(author.setText(correspondent));
			
			String textLine = rs.getString("letter_text");
			String[] splitstring = textLine.split("\n");
 
			for (String a : splitstring){
				author.addContent(txtLn.setText(a));
			}			
		}
		return doc;
	}

 

The code is called from a Data Access Object to turn the letter text into XML to be serialised to a servlet. I'd be grateful for any suggestions or if i should be really be using something like SAX instead. Thanks in advance.
Iain

[Paul Clapham]

It seems to me from the text of your post that you want to have more than one <ln> element. But your code only creates one. This is obviously wrong.

And if you only want one <author> element -- I couldn't tell from the text whether that was actually a requirement or not -- then you should add it to the document element only once. Your code does it repeatedly, which looks wrong.

And no, using SAX would be absurd. SAX is a parser and you aren't parsing a document there.

[Iain Emsley]

Thanks Paul. I've just realised that I'd misunderstood some of the spec but thanks picking up on the adding the element in the loop.