Event driven XML reading (SAX)

Lucee not only allows you to convert a XML file to a object tree (DOM) but it also supports a event driven model (SAX)

The function XMLParse is handy to get a object representation of a complete XML document however for large XML documents this can cause memory issues. This method is an overhead if you simply need to read some data from an XML file and convert it to something else. For this the SAX event driven model is a very handy and lightweight way to do this. Here is an example.

Let's say we want to read in the following XML document:

#!xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<catalog>
    <cd>
        <title>Empire Burlesque</title>
        <artist>Bob Dylan</artist>
        <country>USA</country>
        <company>Columbia</company>
        <price>10.90</price>
        <year>1985</year>
    </cd>
    <cd>
        <title>Hide your heart</title>
        <artist>Bonnie Tyler</artist>
        <country>UK</country>
        <company>CBS Records</company>
        <price>9.90</price>
        <year>1988</year>
    </cd>
</catalog>

To read this we need to define a component that looks like the following and you need to add functions that are listening to certain events of the XML parser (startDocument, startElement, body, endElements, ...), it is completely up to your code to store the data for later use.

#!javascript
component {
    this.cds=[];
    this.cd={};
    this.insideCD=false;
    this.currentName="";
    this.filter={};
    this.removeCD=false;

    /**
    * constructor of the component that takes the path to the xml file and a simple custom made filter
    * @param xmlFile xml File to parse
    * @param filter filter to limit content on certain records
    */
    function init(string xmlFile, struct filter={}) {
        var xmlEventParser=createObject("java","lucee.runtime.helpers.XMLEventParser");
        this.filter=filter;
        // registering the event handlers
        xmlEventParser.init(
            getPageContext(),
            this.startDocument,
            this.startElement,
            this.body,
            this.endElement,
            this.endDocument,
            this.error
        );
        xmlEventParser.start(xmlFile);
        return this.cds;
    }

    /**
    * this function will be called on the start of parsing of an XML Element (Tag)
    */
    function startElement(string uri, string localName, string qName, struct attributes){
        if(localName EQ "cd"){
            this.cd={};
            this.insideCD=true;
            this.removeCD=false;

        }
        else if(this.insideCD){
            this.currentName=localName;
        }
    }

    /**
    * call with body of the tag
    */
    function body(string content){
        if(len(this.currentName)) {
            this.cd[this.currentName]=content;
            if(structKeyExists(this.filter,this.currentName) and content NEQ this.filter[this.currentName])
                this.removeCD=true;
        }
    }

    /**
    * this function will be called at the end of parsing an XML Element (Tag)
    */
    function endElement(string uri, string localName, string qName, struct attributes){
        if(localName EQ "cd") {
            if(!this.removeCD)
                this.cds[arrayLen(this.cds)+1]=this.cd;
            this.insideCD=false;
        }
        this.currentName="";
    }

    /**
    * this function will be called when the document starts to be parsed
    */
    function startDocument(string uri, string localName, string qName, struct attributes){
    }

    /**
    * this function will be called when the document finishes being parsed
    */
    function endDocument(string uri, string localName, string qName, struct attributes){
    }

    /**
    * this function will be called when an error occurs
    */
    function error(struct cfcatch){
        dump(cfcatch);
    }
}

Now we simply can invoke that component to parse the XML file and get the result as an array of structs:

#!html
<!--- 
    Calls XML Catalog Event Parser and converts the data to an array of structs
    with a filter that limits the country to "USA"
 --->
<cfset xmlFile=GetDirectoryFromPath(GetCurrentTemplatePath())&'catalog.xml'>
<cfset cds=new XMLCatalog(xmlFile,{country:'USA'})>
<cfdump var="#cds#">

You can download the complete example here: https://bitbucket.org/lucee/lucee/downloads/lucee-sax-example.zip

Wiki

Lucee / Cookbook_SAX

Event driven XML reading (SAX)