How to read properties from xml file with java?

Question

I have the following xml file:

<resources>
    <resource id="res001">
        <property name="propA" value="A" />
        <property name="propB" value="B" />
    </resource>
    <resource id="res002">
        <property name="propC" value="C" />
        <property name="propD" value="D" />
    </resource>
    <resource id="res003">
        <property name="propE" value="E" />
        <property name="propF" value="F" />
    </resource>
</resources>

How can I do something like this with Java/Xml:

Xml xml = new Xml("my.xml");
Resource res001 = xml.getResouceById("res003");
System.out.println("propF: " + res.getProperty("propF"));

So it prints:

F

I have tried apache commons-configurations XMLConfiguration with XPathExpressionEngine, but I just can't make it work. I have googled and found some examples, but neither would work :( I'm looking for a solution where I don't need to loop through all the elements.

Regards, Alex

Answer 1

This is trivial, assuming you're willing to re-write your properties file into the standard Java format. Assume you have the following in a file called props.xml:

<!DOCTYPE properties SYSTEM "http://java.sun.com/dtd/properties.dtd">
<properties>
    <comment>This is a comment</comment>
    <entry key="propA">A</entry>
    <entry key="propB">B</entry>
    <entry key="propC">C</entry>
    <entry key="propD">D</entry>
    <entry key="propE">E</entry>
    <entry key="propF">F</entry>
</properties>

Then read properties from the file like this:

java.util.Properties prop = new Properties();
prop.loadFromXML(new FileInputStream("props.xml"));
System.out.println(prop.getProperty("propF"));