Best Practice for large XML file builder

Question

I have to build an XML file for an input to a SOAP service in Java. The input xml can consist of at least 1000 tags. What is the best way to build the XML? I have the XSD files but it is a bit complicated to use JAXB. Is XMLStreamWriter a good option for that?

Answer 1

XMLStreamWriter is one of the better APIs to use for writing XML from a Java application, but it has a few quirks (e.g. its namespace handling is a bit bizarre) and you may find it worthwhile to wrap it in a convenience API that knows about the kind of document you are writing, e.g. what namespaces it uses.

One of the advantages of the XMLStreamWriter interface is that there are plenty of implementations to choose from. For example Saxon has an implementation that gives you full control over all the XSLT/XQuery serialization options plus Saxon extensions (for example, you can even control the output order of attributes!)

One of the problems I hit with all event-based APIs is that sooner or later you find yourself forgetting to write an end tag, and that can be quite tricky to debug. Using a wrapper API that forces you to include the element name in a call on endElement() can be useful for debugging; if debugging is switched on you can keep a stack of element names and check that endElement() is writing the right tag; with debugging switched off you just drop this check.

Serializing using JAXB is higher-level, of course, but the downside is that it gives you less control.