[jdom-interest] NullPointerException when changing or adding content (setText() or addContent());

[Patrick Finch]

- The short, short, version:
I have a servlet that passes an XML document as a String object to a 
method contained in a jar file in the war file.
That method (parseRequest()), can read XML template documents form disk, 
and return them as a String.
That method can create new documents from scratch, add stuff to them, 
and return them as as a String.
That method can, so long as I run the jar file (java -jar <jarfile>), 
edit an XML template file and return the edited version as a String.
When that method is used by a servlet, I receive a NullPointerException 
when I try to alter the template file (not writing it back to disk, 
altering it in memory).

- The long and windy version.
Arg, I've been having this problem for a couple of days.
Anyway, I have a servlet, the servlet's soul job in life is to recieve a 
URL encoded XML document via an http POST request, and then, and then 
pass that document as a String to a method living in a jar file, packed 
in the war file. That method, the one in the jar file, takes the String, 
turns it back into an XML document, parses it, and then acts on what it 
reads, returning an XML document that has been XMLOutputted to a String 
object. The XML document it returns is read from a central location on 
disk (not in the webroot, not anywhere special at all as far as I can 
tell). This all works fine.

What doesn't work fine is when I read an XML document from the disk (in 
preperation of sending back to the servlet) and then try to edit a child 
with setText, or addContent, or anything else. Whenever I do that, the 
servlet returns an HTTP 500 saying that there was a NullPointerException 
in the jar-file code at the setText() operation.

Here's the kicker, I decided to test most of this jar code using a Test 
class that reads an XML document from disk, converts it to a String, and 
then sends that to the parseRequest method. That works fine, no 
exceptions, it edits the template document from the disk, and returns 
it. The error happens when the servlet runs the jar file, instead of me 
running it locally.

I can, however, create a new root node, a new document and add content, 
and nothing blows up.

- Plea
If anyone has any idea what's going on (I'm probably just being dumb), I 
would appreciate your advice.

Thanks,
Pat