Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition [Electronic resources]

This interface represents a DOM document, and an object that implements this interface serves as the root of a DOM document tree. Most of the methods defined by the Document interface are "factory methods" that are used to create various types of nodes that can be inserted into this document. Note that there are two versions of the methods for creating attributes and elements. The methods with "NS" in their name are namespace-aware and require the attribute or element name to be specified as a combination of a namespace URI and a local name. You'll notice that throughout the DOM API, methods with "NS" in their names are namespace-aware. Other important methods include the following:

getElementsByTagName( ) and its namespace-aware variant getElementsByTagNameNS( ) search the document tree for Element nodes that have the specified tag name and return a NodeList containing those matching nodes. The Element interface defines methods by the same names that search only within the subtree defined by an Element.

getElementById( ) is a related method that searches the document tree for a single element with the specified unique value for an ID attribute. This is useful when you use an ID attribute to uniquely identify certain tags within an XML document. Note that this method does not search for attributes that are named "id" or "ID". It searches for attributes whose XML type (as declared in the document's DTD) is ID. Such attributes are often named "id", but this is not required.

An XML document must have a single root element. getdocumentElement( ) returns this Element object. Note, however that this does not mean that a Document node has only one child. It must have exactly one child that is an Element, but it can also have other children such as Comment and ProcessingInstruction nodes. The geTDoctype( ) method returns the DocumentType object (or null if there isn't one) that represents the document's DTD. getImplementation( ) returns the the DOMImplementation object that represents the DOM implementation that created this document tree.

public interface

Document extends Node { // Public Instance Methods

5.0 Node

adoptNode (Node

source ) throws DOMException; Attr

createAttribute (String

name ) throws DOMException; Attr

createAttributeNS (String

namespaceURI , String

qualifiedName ) throws DOMException; CDATASection

createCDATASection (String

data ) throws DOMException; Comment

createComment (String

data ); DocumentFragment

createDocumentFragment ( ); Element

createElement (String

tagName ) throws DOMException; Element

createElementNS (String

namespaceURI , String

qualifiedName ) throws DOMException; EntityReference

createEntityReference (String

name ) throws DOMException; ProcessingInstruction

createProcessingInstruction (String

target , String

data ) throws DOMException; Text

createTextNode (String

data ); DocumentType

getDoctype ( ); Element

getDocumentElement ( );

5.0 String

getDocumentURI ( );

5.0 DOMConfiguration

getDomConfig ( ); Element

getElementById (String

elementId ); NodeList

getElementsByTagName (String

tagname ); NodeList

getElementsByTagNameNS (String

namespaceURI , String

localName ); DOMImplementation

getImplementation ( );

5.0 String

getInputEncoding ( );

5.0 boolean

getStrictErrorChecking ( );

5.0 String

getXmlEncoding ( );

5.0 boolean

getXmlStandalone ( );

5.0 String

getXmlVersion ( ); Node

importNode (Node

importedNode , boolean

deep ) throws DOMException;

5.0 void

normalizeDocument ( );

5.0 Node

renameNode (Node

n , String

namespaceURI , String

qualifiedName ) throws DOMException;

5.0 void

setDocumentURI (String

documentURI );

5.0 void

setStrictErrorChecking (boolean

strictErrorChecking );

5.0 void

setXmlStandalone (boolean

xmlStandalone ) throws DOMException;

5.0 void

setXmlVersion (String

xmlVersion ) throws DOMException; }

Returned By

javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.{newDocument( ), parse( )}, DOMImplementation.createDocument( ), Node.getOwnerDocument( )