Accessing the DOM

by Jan Egil Refsnes

Traversing the node tree

One very common way to extract XML elements from an XML document is to traverse the node three and extract the text value of each elements. A small snippet of programming code like a VBScript for/each construct can be written to demonstrate this.

The following VBScript code traverses an XML node tree, and displays the XML elements in the browser:

set xmlDoc=CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xmlDoc.async="false"
xmlDoc.load("note.xml")

for each x in xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes
  document.write(x.nodename)
  document.write(": ")
  document.write(x.text)
next

JUST TRY IT and also try to traverse our CD catalog example.

Providing HTML content from XML files

One of the great promises of XML is the possibility to separate HTML documents from their data. By using an XML parser inside the browser, an HTML page can be constructed as a static document, with an embedded JavaScript to provide dynamic data. When you add that these JavaScripts can access Active Server Pages from a Web server, the future looks very bright.

The following JavaScript reads XML data from an XML document and writes the XML data into (waiting) HTML elements.

var xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xmlDoc.async="false"
xmlDoc.load("note.xml")

nodes = xmlDoc.documentElement.childNodes

to.innerText = nodes.item(0).text
from.innerText = nodes.item(1).text
header.innerText = nodes.item(2).text
body.innerText = nodes.item(3).text

JUST TRY IT

Accessing XML elements by name

The following JavaScript reads XML data from an XML document and writes the XML data into (waiting) HTML elements.

var xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xmlDoc.async="false"
xmlDoc.load("note.xml")

document.write(xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName("from").item(0).text)

JUST TRY IT

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