How to create XML file in Java using DOM

DOM stands for Document Object Model. A DOM is a standard tree structure to define the XML structure. The two most common types of nodes are element nodes and text nodes.

Example

The example contains few important elements:

• create a Document object using DocumentBuilder and DocumentBuilderFactory classes.
• add elements and attributes to the elements.
• use TransformerFactory and Transformer classes to output the Document object to the console or a file.

package com.admfactory.xml;

import java.io.File;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;

public class XMLCreate {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
	try {
	    DocumentBuilderFactory docFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
	    DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docFactory.newDocumentBuilder();

	    /** root elements */
	    Document doc = docBuilder.newDocument();
	    Element rootElement = doc.createElement("users");
	    doc.appendChild(rootElement);

	    /** user elements */
	    Element user = doc.createElement("user");
	    rootElement.appendChild(user);

	    /** set attribute */
	    user.setAttribute("id", "100");

	    /** name element */
	    Element name = doc.createElement("name");
	    name.appendChild(doc.createTextNode("John Doe"));
	    user.appendChild(name);

	    /** email element */
	    Element email = doc.createElement("email");
	    email.appendChild(doc.createTextNode("john.doe@example.com"));
	    user.appendChild(email);

	    /** write the content into xml file */
	    TransformerFactory transformerFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
	    Transformer transformer = transformerFactory.newTransformer();
	    transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
	    transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "2");
	    DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);

	    /** Output to file */
	    // StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new File("C:\\admfactory\\users.xml"));

	    /** Output to console */
	    StreamResult result = new StreamResult(System.out);

	    transformer.transform(source, result);

	} catch (Exception e) {
	    e.printStackTrace();
	}
    }
}

Output

In order to have the pretty printing format activated, you need to setup the indent property and the indent-amount.

transformer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
transformer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "2");

Note: To output the content to a file follow the comments from the example to comment the console output and activate the file output.

/** Output to file */
// StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new File("C:\\admfactory\\file.xml"));

/** Output to console */
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(System.out);

Here is the console output using pretty printing format.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<users>
  <user id="100">
    <name>John Doe</name>
    <email>john.doe@example.com</email>
  </user>
</users>

References

• Oracle DOM