Tutorials : Working with files and directories in Java :

Showing XML in Internet Explorer

If you show this jsp-file in an XML-aware browser like Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 you'll get this picture:

- Figure 3 -

If you click on the "-" characters in front of the tags you'll make them collapse--and clicking on the "+" characters will expand them again.

… and finally: transformed XML

To complete the circle we can apply an XSLT stylesheet to the XML file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="style2.xsl"?> 

<jsp:useBean id=
	"fileXML" class="hansen.playground2.MyFileStructureXML" 
	 scope="session" />>
     
<%
 
fileXML.setDirname("c:\\Dir-A");
fileXML.build();
fileXML.list();
out.println(fileXML.getResult());

%>

(See the stylesheet style2.xsl here). Again you'll need Internet Explorer 5.5+ to get a result, and what you get is . . . . figure 2 again! The circle is closed.

If your servlet engine doesn't accept the "xml declaration" <?xml version="1.0"?> or the "xml processing instruction" <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="style2.xsl"?> you could output them using out.println to the response from your jsp-page. You might also consider upgrading to a newer servlet engine like Tomcat v.4 (http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/tomcat), which I have used for all the examples in this article.

Conclusion

In this article I have shown you the basic Java techniques for reading the contents of a file directory. With the information available in memory as a tree structure it's simple to walk through the tree and show the contents in various formats: simple text lines, HTML, XML and transformed XML.

All the files and programs shown or mentioned in the article can be found in this zip-file.

In a follow-up to this article I'll finish the topic by making yet another subclass to MyFileStructure that will produce a nice graphical view of the tree structure -- like the one in figure 1. Stay in touch!

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