Andy Fish wrote:


> This seems a bit of a limitation in the way DOM represents the document
> element - it seems to treat the root element and the document itself as the
> same thing which isn't really the case. 

The W3C DOM clearly distinguishes Document nodes and Element nodes. I 
don't see why you cannot replace the documentElement node of a document:

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;

import org.w3c.dom.DOMImplementation;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;

public class Test20040703 {
   public static void main (String[] args) {
     try {
       DocumentBuilderFactory documentBuilderFactory = 
DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
       documentBuilderFactory.setNamespaceAware(true);
       DocumentBuilder documentBuilder = 
documentBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();

       DOMImplementation domImplementation = 
documentBuilder.getDOMImplementation();

       Document xmlDocument = domImplementation.createDocument("", 
"gods", null);

       Element god = xmlDocument.createElement("god");

       xmlDocument.getDocumentElement().appendChild(god);

       Element devils = xmlDocument.createElement("devils");

       xmlDocument.replaceChild(devils, xmlDocument.getDocumentElement());

       Element devil = xmlDocument.createElement("devil");

       xmlDocument.getDocumentElement().appendChild(devil);

       System.out.println(xmlDocument.getDocumentElement().getNodeName());
     }
     catch (Exception e) {
       System.out.println("Error: " + e);
     }
   }
}

-- 

	Martin Honnen
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/