How to merge >1000 xml files into one using Java

Question

I am trying to merge many xml files into one. I have successfully done that in DOM, but this solution is limited to a few files. When I run it on multiple files >1000 I am getting a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError.

What I want to achieve is where i have the following files

file 1:

<root>
....
</root>

file 2:

<root>
......
</root>

file n:

<root>
....
</root>

resulting in: output:

<rootSet>
<root>
....
</root>
<root>
....
</root>
<root>
....
</root>
</rootSet>

This is my current implementation:

    DocumentBuilderFactory docFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
    DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
    Document doc = docBuilder.newDocument();
    Element rootSetElement = doc.createElement("rootSet");
    Node rootSetNode = doc.appendChild(rootSetElement);
    Element creationElement = doc.createElement("creationDate");
    rootSetNode.appendChild(creationElement);
    creationElement.setTextContent(dateString); 
    File dir = new File("/tmp/rootFiles");
    String[] files = dir.list();
    if (files == null) {
        System.out.println("No roots to merge!");
    } else {
        Document rootDocument;
            for (int i=0; i<files.length; i++) {
                       File filename = new File(dir+"/"+files[i]);        
               rootDocument = docBuilder.parse(filename);
               Node tempDoc = doc.importNode((Node) Document.getElementsByTagName("root").item(0), true);
               rootSetNode.appendChild(tempDoc);
        }
    }   

I have experimented a lot with xslt, sax, but I seem to keep missing something. Any help would be highly appreciated

Answer 1

You might also consider using StAX. Here's code that would do what you want:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.Writer;

import javax.xml.stream.XMLEventFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLEventReader;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLEventWriter;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLInputFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLOutputFactory;
import javax.xml.stream.events.XMLEvent;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;

public class XMLConcat {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Throwable {
        File dir = new File("/tmp/rootFiles");
        File[] rootFiles = dir.listFiles();

        Writer outputWriter = new FileWriter("/tmp/mergedFile.xml");
        XMLOutputFactory xmlOutFactory = XMLOutputFactory.newFactory();
        XMLEventWriter xmlEventWriter = xmlOutFactory.createXMLEventWriter(outputWriter);
        XMLEventFactory xmlEventFactory = XMLEventFactory.newFactory();

        xmlEventWriter.add(xmlEventFactory.createStartDocument());
        xmlEventWriter.add(xmlEventFactory.createStartElement("", null, "rootSet"));

        XMLInputFactory xmlInFactory = XMLInputFactory.newFactory();
        for (File rootFile : rootFiles) {
            XMLEventReader xmlEventReader = xmlInFactory.createXMLEventReader(new StreamSource(rootFile));
            XMLEvent event = xmlEventReader.nextEvent();
            // Skip ahead in the input to the opening document element
            while (event.getEventType() != XMLEvent.START_ELEMENT) {
                event = xmlEventReader.nextEvent();
            }

            do {
                xmlEventWriter.add(event);
                event = xmlEventReader.nextEvent();
            } while (event.getEventType() != XMLEvent.END_DOCUMENT);
            xmlEventReader.close();
        }

        xmlEventWriter.add(xmlEventFactory.createEndElement("", null, "rootSet"));
        xmlEventWriter.add(xmlEventFactory.createEndDocument());

        xmlEventWriter.close();
        outputWriter.close();
    }
}

One minor caveat is that this API seems to mess with empty tags, changing <foo/> into <foo></foo>.

Answer 2

Just do it without any xml-parsing as it doesn't seem to require any actual parsing of the xml.

For efficiency do something like this:

File dir = new File("/tmp/rootFiles");
String[] files = dir.list();
if (files == null) {
    System.out.println("No roots to merge!");
} else {
        try (FileChannel output = new FileOutputStream("output").getChannel()) {
            ByteBuffer buff = ByteBuffer.allocate(32);
            buff.put("<rootSet>\n".getBytes()); // specify encoding too
            buff.flip();
            output.write(buff);
            buff.clear();
            for (String file : files) {
                try (FileChannel in = new FileInputStream(new File(dir, file).getChannel()) {
                    in.transferTo(0, 1 << 24, output);
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
            buff.put("</rootSet>\n".getBytes()); // specify encoding too
            buff.flip();
            output.write(buff);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

Answer 3

DOM needs to keep the whole document in memory. If you don't need to do any special operation with your tags, I would simply use an InputStream and read all the files. If you need to do some operations, then use SAX.