XML Parsing and deserialization

Question

I have a xml file which Im reading it from my class

<Testclasses>
<Class>new SomeClass1()</class>
<class>new SomeClass2()</class>
</Testclasses>

so i have a method in the class which takes an argument as an object as below

public List<Object> retriveValuesFromXml(){
    ....
    This method parses the values from xml and reads the different object and returns a
    list of objects.
}

@Test
public void someMethod1(){

   ArrayList<Object> list_of_objects= retriveValuesFromXml();

   for(Object x :list_of_objects){
      someMethod2(x); //for example : x = new SomeClass1() or x = new SomeClass2()
   }
}

public void someMethod2(Object target){
   .....
}

where target is the new SomeClass() object created, which we are reading from the xml. Can i know how to parse the xml values from the file as an object and store it in the list? I just want to use list of all the class objects in my project and send them to this test class. later even if any new classes get added to the project i should be able to add to this xml file and pass the class object to this test.

Answer 1

You may want to use simple Java Libraries such as XStream, which is very simple to use. All you need to define a POJO class to hold the parse values from XML and then use the library to parse the XML and produce the converted java objects for you.

     XStream xstream = new XStream();

     //converting object to XML
     String xml = xstream.toXML(myObject);

     //converting xml to object
     MyClass myObject = (MyClass)xstream.fromXML(xml);

Please have a look at its two minutes tutorial.

Answer 2

its something like that i imagine

DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
org.w3c.dom.Document doc = db.parse("name_of_file.xml");

Element rootElement = doc.getDocumentElement();
NodeList nl=rootElement.getElementsByTagName("TestClass");