[jdom-interest] Re: XMLOutputter and Comments

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

At 12:22 PM -0700 6/21/00, Jason Hunter wrote:
For example:
>>
>> protected void printMixedContentElement(Element element, Writer out, int
>> indentLevel) throws IOException
>> protected void printStringOnlyElement(Element element, Writer out, int
>> indentLevel) throws IOException
>> protected void printEmptyElement(Element element, Writer out, int
>> indentLevel) throws IOException
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
>Can you explain cases where you'd want to do things differently?
>


What I really want to do is this. Instead of

<tag>several thousand characters of text...</tag>

I want to be able to output

<tag>
   80 characters of text...
   another 80 characters of text...
   another 80 characters of text...
   ...
</tag>

Providing a protected printText() method doesn't seem sufficient for 
this purpose since when the method started, the start tag would have 
already been written onto the stream and you wouldn't know where you 
were on the line. And I'd still like to be able to  output 
<strong>small amount of text</strong> on one line like this:

<strong>small amount of text</strong>

so the decision about word wrapping (or not) needs to be made in the 
printElement() method. However, word wrapping isn't necessary for 
empty elements or elements that only contain child elements.

The algorithms for all three element types are different. Right now 
they're split by an if-else-if block in printElement() that handles 
each of the three cases. I'd prefer to split the three cases into 
separate methods dispatched from printElement() so that they could be 
overridden or changed separately.

The more I think about this, the trickier it seems. Certainly what 
we've got  now is good enough for most cases, but it really does miss 
the simple case of pretty printing with word wrapping of long lines. 
Of course, I suppose you'd probably want to wrap long tag names and 
attribute lists too. I wonder if this doesn't require a full-fledged 
redesign of the class so that all methods know which column they're 
on at any given time. I need to think about this some more.

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo at metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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