[jdom-interest] Issue: When the DTD is not available

[Brett McLaughlin]

Richard Monson-Haefel wrote:
> 
> First: Congratulations to Brett McLaughlin, Jason Hunter and others on
> the JDOM project for creating a an exceptional XML API.  It's very
> impressive.

Thanks!

> 
> <disclaimer> I don't claim to have expertise in XML so the issue I'm
> about to bring up may not be an issue at all. <disclaimer>

;-)

> 
> I noticed that I get exceptions from the build operations of both the
> SAXBuilder and DOMBuilder if the DTD is not physically available when
> parsing the XML document.  This is understandable if I set validate=true
> when constructing a builder, but doesn't seem logical if I set
> validate=false.

You're right, it should not be reported up. I completely agree.

> 
> The exceptions are generated by the underlying parsers, so there may not
> be a solution, but it would be nice -- when validate is set to false --
> if you could allow a file to be parsed without requiring the presence of
> the DTD.

It is in the underlying parser, but I think we can write some code to
catch that error, and deal with it internally, rather than propogating
it up to the calling program (your code, in this case).

> 
> The "problem" occurs under the following conditions:
> 
> The DTD is public at some Internet address but the file is not there.
> The DTD is public at some Internet address but the machine is not
> connected.
> The DTD is a system file, but its not in the same directory as the VM.

I'll try and get this going this weekend... I've got a heating and air
guy here today, as well as furniture being delivered, so I'm tied up
today ;-)

-Brett

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Richard
> 
> --
> Richard Monson-Haefel
> Author of Enterprise JavaBeans, 2nd Edition  (O'Reilly 2000)
> Co-Author of Java Message Service (O'Reilly 2000)
> http://www.EjbNow.com
> 
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