XML formatted Java string manipulation

I'm developing a plugin that has node(computer) objects with attributes like:

String name
String description
String labels
Launcher computerLauncher
...

I can convert the node(computer) object to an XML-formated String like:

String xml = jenkins.ins开发者_运维技巧tance.toXML(node);

Which gives me a string:

<name>Computer1</name>
<description>This is a description</description>
<labels>label1 label2</labels>
<launcher>windows.object.launcher.12da1</launcher>

Then I can go the other way back:

Node node = jenkins.instance.fromXML(xml);

I have no methods for changing attributes in a Node so I want to convert it to XML, change som attributes and then make it a Node again.

I see two options

1. Manipulate the XML with some String methods to replace everything in between the <> tags.

2. Try to cast the XML string to something like a real Object and manipulate it that way.

Not sure what would be the best approach.

Why invent something new when there already is support for all that using Java's DOM (Document Object Model) API?

Use a DocumentBuilderFactory to get a DocumentBuilder and create a Document instance. With this you can create the 'Node' objects (please note that the example you posted is actually not valid XML, it's missing a root node) in your toXML method, serializing the Document to a String could be done by using a Transformer.

With the DOM API you can also modify the attributes of your existing elements.

Parsing the Document instance from an XML string is realized again with the help of the DocumentBuilder, using DocumentBuilder#parse.

If your DOM operations are not too complex this should be a nice, quick way to accomplish your goal.

It makes sense to me to use a DOM-like approach. But don't use DOM itself: there are much better alternatives like JDOM and XOM that have much friendlier APIs.

recenty I had to manipulate large XML files (my software had to create some XML files dynamically and get input data from some other XML files). To do this I've used JAXB, which is a very neat API that marshalls XML files into Java objects and Java objects into XML files automatically.

However to do this I had to create a XSD file to specify the XMLs that I would need to read and write from.

Therefore JAXB requires more work to set up than DOM, so if your needs are simple I suggest that you use DOM, however if your needs are more complex, then I would suggest JAXB.