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<!DOCTYPE faqs SYSTEM "sbk:/style/dtd/faqs.dtd">

<faqs title="Programming &XercesCName;">

  <faq title="Does &XercesCName; support XML Schema?">

    <q> Does &XercesCName; support Schema?</q>

    <a>
      <p>Yes, &XercesCName; &XercesC3Version; contains an implementation
         of the W3C XML Schema Language, a recommendation of the Worldwide Web Consortium
         available in three parts:
         <jump href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/">XML Schema: Primer</jump> and
         <jump href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1/">XML Schema: Structures</jump> and
         <jump href="http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/">XML Schema: Datatypes</jump>.
         We consider this implementation complete.  See the
         <jump href="schema-&XercesC3Series;.html#limitation">XML Schema Support</jump> page for limitations.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Does &XercesCName; support XPath?">

    <q> Does &XercesCName; support XPath?</q>

    <a>

      <p>&XercesCName; &XercesC3Version; provides partial XPath 1 implementation
         for the purposes of handling XML Schema identity constraints.
         The same engine is made available through the DOMDocument::evaluate API to
         let the user perform simple XPath queries involving DOMElement nodes only,
         with no predicate testing and allowing the "//" operator only as the initial
         step. For full XPath 1 and 2 support refer to the
         <jump href="http://xqilla.sourceforge.net">XQilla</jump> and
         <jump href="http://xml.apache.org/xalan-c/overview.html">Apache Xalan C++</jump>
         open source projects.
      </p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why does my application crash when instantiating the parser?">

    <q>Why does my application crash when instantiating the parser?</q>

    <a>

      <p>In order to work with the &XercesCName; parser, you have to first
        initialize the XML subsystem. The most common mistake is to forget this
        initialization. Before you make any calls to &XercesCName; APIs, you must
        call XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize(): </p>

<source>
try {
   XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize();
}
catch (const XMLException&amp; toCatch) {
   // Do your failure processing here
}</source>

      <p>This initializes the &XercesCProjectName; system and sets its internal
        variables. Note that you must include the <code>xercesc/util/PlatformUtils.hpp</code> file for this to work.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Is it OK to call the XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize/Terminate pair of routines multiple times in one program?">
    <q>Is it OK to call the XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize/Terminate pair of routines multiple times in one program?</q>
    <a>
      <p>Yes. Note, however, that the application needs to guarantee that the
         XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() and XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()
         methods are called from the same thread (usually the initial
         thread executing main()) or proper synchronization is performed
         by the application if multiple threads call
         XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() and XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()
         concurrently.</p>

      <p>If you are calling XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() a number of times, and then follow with
         XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate() the same number of times, only the first XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize()
         will do the initialization, and only the last XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate() will clean up
         the memory.  The other calls are ignored.
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why does my application crash after calling XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()?">

    <q>Why does my application crash after calling XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()?</q>

    <a>

      <p>Please make sure the XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate() is the last &XercesCName; function to be called
         in your program.  NO explicit nor implicit &XercesCName; destructor (those local data that are
         destructed when going out of scope) should be called after XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate().
      </p>
      <p>
         For example consider the following code snippet which is incorrect:
      </p>

<source>
1: {
2:    XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize();
3:    XercesDOMParser parser;
4:    XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate();
5: }
</source>

      <p>The XercesDOMParser object "parser" is destructed when going out of scope at line 5 before the closing
         brace.  As a result, XercesDOMParser destructor is called at line 5 after
         XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate() which is incorrect.  Correct code should be:
      </p>

<source>
1: {
2:    XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize();
2a:    {
3:           XercesDOMParser parser;
3a:    }
4:    XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate();
5: }
</source>

      <p>The extra pair of braces (line 2a and 3a) ensures that all implicit destructors are called
         before terminating &XercesCName;.</p>

      <p>Note also that the application needs to guarantee that the
         XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() and XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()
         methods are called from the same thread (usually the initial
         thread executing main()) or proper synchronization is performed
         by the application if multiple threads call
         XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() and XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()
         concurrently.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Is &XercesCName; thread-safe?">

    <q>Is &XercesCName; thread-safe?</q>

    <a>
     <p>The answer is yes if you observe the following rules for using
        &XercesCName; in a multi-threaded environment:</p>

      <p>Within an address space, an instance of the parser may be used without
        restriction from a single thread, or an instance of the parser can be accessed
        from multiple threads, provided the application guarantees that only one thread
        has entered a method of the parser at any one time.</p>

      <p>When two or more parser instances exist in a process, the instances can
        be used concurrently, without external synchronization. That is, in an
        application containing two parsers and two threads, one parser can be running
        within the first thread concurrently with the second parser running within the
        second thread.</p>

      <p>The same rules apply to &XercesCName; DOM documents. Multiple document
        instances may be concurrently accessed from different threads, but any given
        document instance can only be accessed by one thread at a time.</p>

      <p>The application also needs to guarantee that the
         XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() and XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()
         methods are called from the same thread (usually the initial
         thread executing main()) or proper synchronization is performed
         by the application if multiple threads call
         XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() and XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()
         concurrently.</p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="I am seeing memory leaks in &XercesCName;. Are they real?">

    <q>I am seeing memory leaks in &XercesCName;. Are they real?</q>

    <a>

      <p>The &XercesCName; library allocates and caches some commonly reused
        items. The storage for these may be reported as memory leaks by some heap
        analysis tools; to avoid the problem, call the function <code>XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate()</code> before your application exits. This will free all memory that was being
        held by the library.</p>

      <p>For most applications, the use of <code>Terminate()</code> is optional. The system will recover all memory when the application
        process shuts down. The exception to this is the use of &XercesCName; from DLLs
        that will be repeatedly loaded and unloaded from within the same process. To
        avoid memory leaks with this kind of use, <code>Terminate()</code> must be called before unloading the &XercesCName; library</p>

      <p>To ensure all the memory held by the parser are freed, the number of XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate() calls
         should match the number of XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() calls.
      </p>

      <p>If you have built &XercesCName; with dependency on ICU then you may
         want to call the u_cleanup() ICU function to clean up
         ICU static data. Refer to the ICU documentation for details.
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Can &XercesCName; create an XML skeleton based on a DTD">

    <q>Is there a function that creates an XML file from a DTD (obviously
       with the values missing, a skeleton)?</q>
    <a>

      <p>No, there is no such functionality.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Can I use &XercesCName; to perform write validation">

    <q>Can I use &XercesCName; to perform "write validation"? That is, having an
      appropriate Grammar and being able to add elements to the DOM whilst validating
      against the grammar?</q>

    <a>

      <p>No, there is no such functionality.</p>

      <p>The best you can do for now is to create the DOM document, write it back
        as XML and re-parse it with validation turned on.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Can I validate the data contained in a DOM tree?">

    <q>Is there a facility in &XercesCName; to validate the data contained in a
      DOM tree? That is, without saving and re-parsing the source document?</q>

    <a>
      <p>No, there is no such functionality. The best you can do for now is to create the DOM document, write it back
        as XML and re-parse it with validation turned on.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="How to write out a DOM tree into a string or an XML file?">
     <q>How to write out a DOM tree into a string or an XML file?</q>
     <a>
      <p>You can use
         the DOMLSSerializer::writeToString, or DOMLSSerializer::writeNode to serialize a DOM tree.
         Please refer to the sample DOMPrint or the API documentation for more details of
         DOMLSSerializer.</p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why doesn't DOMNode::cloneNode() clone the pointer assigned to a DOMNode via DOMNode::setUserData()?">
    <q>Why doesn't DOMNode::cloneNode() clone the pointer assigned to a DOMNode via DOMNode::setUserData()?</q>
    <a>
      <p>&XercesCName; supports the DOMNode::userData specified
      in <jump href="http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407/core.html#ID-3A0ED0A4">
      the DOM level 3 Node interface</jump>.  As
      is made clear in the description of the behavior of
      <code>cloneNode()</code>, userData that has been set on the
      Node is not cloned.  Thus, if the userData is to be copied
      to the new Node, this copy must be effected manually.
      Note further that the operation of <code>importNode()</code>
      is specified similarly.
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="How are entity reference nodes handled in DOM?">

    <q>How are entity reference nodes handled in DOM?</q>

    <a>

      <p>If you are using the native DOM classes, the function <code>setCreateEntityReferenceNodes</code>
        controls how entities appear in the DOM tree. When
        setCreateEntityReferenceNodes is set to true (the default), an occurrence of an
        entity reference in the XML document will be represented by a subtree with an
        EntityReference node at the root whose children represent the entity expansion.
        Entity expansion will be a DOM tree representing the structure of the entity
        expansion, not a text node containing the entity expansion as text.</p>

      <p>If setCreateEntityReferenceNodes is false, an entity reference in the XML
        document is represented by only the nodes that represent the entity expansion.
        The DOM tree will not contain any entityReference nodes.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Can I use &XercesCName; to parse HTML?">

    <q>Can I use &XercesCName; to parse HTML?</q>

    <a>

      <p>Yes, but only if the HTML follows the rules given in the
        <jump href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml">XML specification</jump>. Most HTML,
        however, does not follow the XML rules, and will generate XML well-formedness
        errors.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="I keep getting an error: &quot;invalid UTF-8 character&quot;. What's wrong?">

    <q>I keep getting an error: "invalid UTF-8 character". What's wrong?</q>

    <a>

      <p>Most commonly, the XML <code>encoding =</code> declaration is either incorrect or missing. Without a declaration, XML
        defaults to the use utf-8 character encoding, which is not compatible with the
        default text file encoding on most systems.</p>

      <p>The XML declaration should look something like this:</p>

      <p><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?&gt;</code></p>

      <p>Make sure to specify the encoding that is actually used by file. The
        encoding for "plain" text files depends both on the operating system and the
        locale (country and language) in use.</p>

      <p>Another common source of problems is characters that are not
        allowed in XML documents, according to the XML spec. Typical disallowed
        characters are control characters, even if you escape them using the Character
        Reference form. See the XML specification, sections 2.2 and 4.1 for details.
        If the parser is generating an <code>Invalid character (Unicode: 0x???)</code> error, it is very likely that there's a character in there that you
        can't see. You can generally use a UNIX command like "od -hc" to find it.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="What encodings are supported by &XercesCName;?">

    <q>What encodings are supported by &XercesCName;?</q>

    <a>
      <p>&XercesCName; has intrinsic support for ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (Big/Small
        Endian), UCS4 (Big/Small Endian), EBCDIC code pages IBM037, IBM1047 and IBM1140
        encodings, ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin1) and Windows-1252. This means that it can
        always parse input XML files in these above mentioned encodings.</p>

      <p>Furthermore, if you build &XercesCName; with the International Components
         for Unicode (ICU) as a transcoder then the list of supported encodings
         extends to over 100 different encodings that are supported by
         ICU.  In particular, all the encodings registered with the
         Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) are supported
         in this configuration.</p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq   title="What character encoding should I use when creating XML documents?">

    <q>What character encoding should I use when creating XML documents?</q>

    <a>

      <p>The best choice in most cases is either utf-8 or utf-16. Advantages of
        these encodings include:</p>

      <ul>
        <li>The best portability. These encodings are more widely supported by
          XML processors than any others, meaning that your documents will have the best
          possible chance of being read correctly, no matter where they end up.</li>
        <li>Full international character support. Both utf-8 and utf-16 cover the
          full Unicode character set, which includes all of the characters from all major
          national, international and industry character sets.</li>
        <li>Efficient. utf-8 has the smaller storage requirements for documents
          that are primarily composed of characters from the Latin alphabet. utf-16 is
          more efficient for encoding Asian languages. But both encodings cover all
          languages without loss.</li>
      </ul>

      <p>The only drawback of utf-8 or utf-16 is that they are not the native
        text file format for most systems, meaning that some text file editors
        and viewers can not be directly used.</p>

      <p>A second choice of encoding would be any of the others listed in the
        table above. This works best when the xml encoding is the same as the default
        system encoding on the machine where the XML document is being prepared,
        because the document will then display correctly as a plain text file. For UNIX
        systems in countries speaking Western European languages, the encoding will
        usually be iso-8859-1.</p>

      <p>A word of caution for Windows users: The default character set on
        Windows systems is windows-1252, not iso-8859-1. While &XercesCName; does
        recognize this Windows encoding, it is a poor choice for portable XML data
        because it is not widely recognized by other XML processing tools. If you are
        using a Windows-based editing tool to generate XML, check which character set
        it generates, and make sure that the resulting XML specifies the correct name
        in the <code>encoding="..."</code> declaration.</p>

    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why does deleting a transcoded string result in assertion on windows?">
    <q>Why does deleting a transcoded string result in assertion on windows?</q>
    <a>
      <p>Both your application program and the &XercesCName; DLL must use the same DLL version of the
         runtime library.  If either statically links to the runtime library, this
		 problem will still occur.</p>

      <p>For a Visual Studio build the runtime library setting MUST
         be "Multithreaded DLL" for release builds and "Debug Multithreaded DLL" for
	 debug builds.</p>

      <p>To bypass such problem, instead of calling operator delete[] directly, you can use the
         provided function XMLString::release to delete any string that was allocated by the parser.
         This will ensure the string is allocated and deleted by the same DLL and such assertion
         problem should be resolved.</p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="How do I transcode to/from something besides the local code page?">
    <q>How do I transcode to/from something besides the local code page?</q>
    <a>
      <p>XMLString::transcode() will transcode from XMLCh to the local code page, and
         other APIs which take a char* assume that the source text is in the local
         code page. If this is not true, you must transcode the text yourself. You
         can do this using local transcoding support on your OS, such as Iconv on
         Unix or IBM's ICU package. However, if your transcoding needs are simple,
         you can achieve better portability by using the &XercesCName; parser's
         transcoder wrappers. You get a transcoder like this:
       </p>
       <ul>
         <li>
            Call XMLPlatformUtils::fgTransServer->MakeNewTranscoderFor() and provide
            the name of the encoding you wish to create a transcoder for. This will
            return a transcoder to you, which you own and must delete when you are
            through with it.

           NOTE: You must provide a maximum block size that you will pass to the transcoder
           at one time, and you must pass blocks of characters of this count or smaller when
           you do your transcoding. The reason for this is that this is really an
           internal API and is used by the parser itself to do transcoding. The parser
           always does transcoding in known block sizes, and this allows transcoders to
           be much more efficient for internal use since it knows the max size it will
           ever have to deal with and can set itself up for that internally. In
           general, you should stick to block sizes in the 4 to 64K range.
         </li>
         <li>
            The returned transcoder is something derived from XMLTranscoder, so they
            are all returned to you via that interface.
         </li>
         <li>
            This object is really just a wrapper around the underlying transcoding
            system actually in use by your version of &XercesCName;, and does whatever is
            necessary to handle differences between the XMLCh representation and the
            representation used by that underlying transcoding system.
         </li>
         <li>
            The transcoder object has two primary APIs, transcodeFrom() and
            transcodeTo(). These transcode between the XMLCh format and the encoding you
            indicated.
         </li>
         <li>
            These APIs will transcode as much of the source data as will fit into the
            outgoing buffer you provide. They will tell you how much of the source they
            ate and how much of the target they filled. You can use this information to
            continue the process until all source is consumed.
         </li>
         <li>
            char* data is always dealt with in terms of bytes, and XMLCh data is
            always dealt with in terms of characters. Don't mix up which you are dealing
            with or you will not get the correct results, since many encodings don't
            have a one to one relationship of characters to bytes.
         </li>
         <li>
            When transcoding from XMLCh to the target encoding, the transcodeTo()
            method provides an 'unrepresentable flag' parameter, which tells the
            transcoder how to deal with an XMLCh code point that cannot be converted
            legally to the target encoding, which can easily happen since XMLCh is
            Unicode and can represent thousands of code points. The options are to use a
            default replacement character (which the underlying transcoding service will
            choose, and which is guaranteed to be legal for the target encoding), or to
            throw an exception.
         </li>
       </ul>
         <p>Here is an example:</p>
<source>
// Create an XMLTranscoder that is able to transcode between
// Unicode and UTF-8.
//
XMLTranscoder* t = XMLPlatformUtils::fgTransService->makeNewTranscoderFor(
  "UTF-8", failReason, 16*1024);

// Source string is in Unicode, want to transcode to UTF-8
t-&gt;transcodeTo(source_unicode,
                  length,
                  result_utf8,
                  length,
                  charsEaten,
                  XMLTranscoder::UnRep_Throw);

// Source string in UTF-8, want to transcode to Unicode.
t-&gt;transcodeFrom(source_utf8,
                    length,
                    result_unicode,
                    length,
                    bytesEaten,
                    (unsigned char*)charSz);
</source>

        <p>An even simpler way to transcode to a different encoding is
           to use the TranscodeToStr and TranscodeFromStr wrapper classes
           which represent a one-time transcoding and encapsulate all the
           memory management. Refer to the API Reference for more information.</p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why does the parser still try to locate the DTD even validation is turned off
       and how to ignore external DTD reference?">

    <q>Why does the parser still try to locate the DTD even validation is turned off
       and how to ignore external DTD reference?</q>

    <a>

      <p>When DTD is referenced, the parser will try to read it, because DTDs can
         provide a lot more information than just validation. It defines entities and
         notations, external unparsed entities, default attributes, character
         entities, etc. Therefore the parser will always try to read it if present, even if
         validation is turned off.
      </p>

      <p>To ignore external DTDs completely you can call
         <code>setLoadExternalDTD(false)</code> (or
         <code>setFeature(XMLUni::fgXercesLoadExternalDTD, false)</code>
         to disable the loading of external DTD.   The parser will then ignore
         any external DTD completely if the validationScheme is set to Val_Never.
      </p>

      <p>Note: This flag is ignored if the validationScheme is set to Val_Always or Val_Auto.
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why does the XML data generated by the DOMLSSerializer does not match my original XML input?">

    <q>Why does the XML data generated by the DOMLSSerializer does not match my original XML input?</q>

    <a>

      <p>If you parse an xml document using XercesDOMParser or DOMLSParser and pass such DOMNode
         to DOMLSSerializer for serialization, you may not get something that is exactly the same
         as the original XML data.   The parser may have done normalization, end of line conversion,
         or has expanded the entity reference as per the XML 1.0 specification, 4.4 XML Processor Treatment of
         Entities and References.   From DOMLSSerializer perspective, it does not know what the original
         string was, all it sees is a processed DOMNode generated by the parser.
         But since the DOMLSSerializer is supposed to generate something that is parsable if sent
         back to the parser, it will not print the DOMNode node value as is. The DOMLSSerializer
         may do some "touch up" to the output data for it to be parsable.</p>

      <p>See <jump href="program-dom-&XercesC3Series;.html#DOMLSSerializerEntityRef">How does DOMLSSerializer handle built-in entity
         Reference in node value?</jump> to understand further how DOMLSSerializer touches up the entity reference.
      </p>
    </a>
  </faq>

  <faq title="Why does my application crash when deleting the parser after releasing a document?">

    <q>Why does my application crash when deleting the parser after releasing a document?</q>

    <a>

      <p>In most cases, the parser handles deleting documents when the parser gets deleted.  However, if an application
         needs to release a document, it shall adopt the document before releasing it, so that the parser
         knows that the ownership of this particular document is transfered to the application and will not
         try to delete it once the parser gets deleted.
      </p>

<source>
XercesDOMParser *parser = new XercesDOMParser;
...
try
{
    parser->parse(xml_file);
}
catch ()
{
...
}
DOMNode *doc = parser->getDocument();
...
parser->adoptDocument();
doc->release();
...
delete parser;
</source>

      <p>The alternative to release document is to call parser's resetDocumentPool(), which releases
         all the documents parsed.
      </p>

    </a>
  </faq>

</faqs>