Book Image

Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g

Book Image

Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g

Overview of this book

XML is an open standard for creating markup languages and exchanging structured documents and data over the Internet. JDeveloper 11g presents an effective, quick, and easy-to-use means of processing XML documents. Inspired by the author's previous XML articles for the Oracle community, this expanded hands-on tutorial guides newcomers and intermediate users through JDeveloper 11g and XML document development. It offers up-to-date information on working with the latest version of JDeveloper, and brand new information on JAXB 2.0 support in JDeveloper 11g. Filled with illustrations, explanatory tables, and comprehensive instructions, this book walks the reader through the wide assortment of JDeveloper's capabilities. Oracle's JDeveloper 11g is an Integrated Development Environment that provides a visual and declarative approach to application development. Over the course of 14 chapters, readers will get hands-on with JDeveloper as the comprehensive and self-contained tutorials provide clear instruction on the key XML tasks that JDeveloper can accomplish. Filled with practical information and illustrated examples, this book shows the reader how to create, parse, and store XML documents quickly, as well as providing step-by-step instructions on how to construct an XML schema and use the schema to validate an XML document. Oracle's XML Developer Kit (XDK) offers a set of components, tools, and utilities for developing XML-based applications, and developers will find the detailed XDK coverage invaluable. Later chapters are given over to using XPath, transforming XML with XSLT, and using the JSTL XML Tag Library. Moving through the book, a chapter on the JAXB 2.0 API shows you how to bind, marshal and unmarshal XML documents, before we finally delve into comparing XML documents, and converting them into PDF and Excel formats. In all, this book will enable the reader to gain a good and wide-ranging understanding of what JDeveloper has to offer for XML processing.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Processing XML documents with Oracle JDeveloper 11g
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 10. Comparing XML Documents

As an XML developer, you might sometimes be interested in comparing a modified XML document with the pre-modified version of that document. Or you might want to compare two XML documents that are based on the same DTD or XML schema. This chapter is designed to give you the information you need to answer the following questions:

  • Is one XML document the same as another?

  • What are the differences between two XML documents?

  • How to transform one XML document to the other?

Various tools are available to compare XML documents. In the following table we discuss some of the commonly used XML tools to compare XML documents and their features:

XML Comparison Tool

Description

Microsoft XML Diff and Patch Tool

XML Diff compares only the XML-based features and ignores the following features:

  • Order of attributes

  • Insignificant whitespaces

  • Document encoding

XML Diff does not differentiate between an empty element, <elementA/>, and an element with no content, <elementA...