xmlcreate
Overview
xmlcreate is a Node.js module that can be used to easily build XML using a simple API.
Features
xmlcreate uses a DOM-style API to build XML. Each construct in XML, including elements, attributes, and even the document itself, is represented as a node in a tree with a document node at the root.
Each node has a set of properties corresponding to the node's properties in XML. For example, the element node has a name property, while the CDATA node has a character data property.
Each node also has a set of children corresponding to the node's value, children or attributes in XML, depending on the context. For example, the XML declaration and document type declaration are represented as child nodes of the root document node, while sub-elements and element attributes are represented as child nodes of element nodes.
xmlcreate performs some basic validation during tree building to ensure that the resulting XML is well-formed. Nodes can only have certain types or quantities of nodes as children, while node properties are checked to ensure that they do not contain characters disallowed in XML for that node or in general.
However, xmlcreate does not perform comprehensive validation. For example, it does not match the tree structure against a schema or confirm that entity references are valid. You should use a XML parser for this purpose instead.
Once the tree is built, the tree itself or any of its subtrees can be serialized to text. The formatting of the text is customizable.
Installation
The easiest way to install xmlcreate is using npm:
npm install xmlcreate
You can also build xmlcreate from source using npm, gulp, and typings:
git clone https://github.com/michaelkourlas/node-xmlcreate.git
npm install
gulp
You'll need to install gulp first if you don't have it:
npm install -g gulp
You can then copy the folder into your node_modules directory.
The default target will build the production variant of xmlcreate, run all
tests, and build the documentation.
You can build the production variant without running tests using the target
prod. You can also build the development version using the target dev. At
the moment, the only difference between the two is that the development version
includes source maps.
Usage
The documentation for the current version is available here.
You can also build the documentation using gulp:
gulp docs
Examples
The following example illustrates the basic usage of xmlcreate:
var xmlcreate = require("xmlcreate");
var document = xmlcreate.document("html");
document
.decl({encoding: "UTF-8"})
.up()
.dtd("html", "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd",
"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN")
.up()
.root()
.attribute("xmlns", "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml")
.up()
.attribute("xml:lang", "en")
.up()
.attribute("lang", "en")
.up()
.element("head")
.element("title")
.charData("My page title")
.up()
.up()
.up()
.element("body")
.element("h1")
.charData("Welcome!")
.up()
.up()
.element("p")
.charData("This is some text on my website.");
console.log(document.toString({doubleQuotes: true}));
This example produces the following XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>My page title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome!</h1>
<p>This is some text on my website.</p>
</body>
</html>
Additional examples can be found in examples/example.js.
Tests
xmlcreate includes a set of tests to verify core functionality. You can run the tests using gulp:
gulp test
The test target builds the production variant of xmlcreate before running
the tests. The test-prod target does the same thing, while the test-dev
target builds the development variant first instead.
License
xmlcreate is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Please see the LICENSE.md file for more information.