Web Services, Part VII: XML Object's Nodes and Types

In this column we continue our series on Web services. In Part I, we introduced you to this hot topic. In Part II, we showed you how to call Web services. In Part III, we presented the WebService behavior and its four supported methods. In Part IV, we continued our coverage of the WebService behavior by describing its objects and properties. In Part V, we dove into XML and XSLT. In Part VI, we started a miniseries on how to load and manipulate XML files from JavaScript. In this column we continue this miniseries and focus on the DOMDocument's nodes and node types.

When loading an XML file to the browser's memory, the data read in is organized in an object, the DOMDocument object. You can load data into this object, navigate it, and query its nodes. In this column, we'll describe the twelve different node types. For each node type, we'll tell you its possible parent types, as well as its possible child types. We'll explain how to set a node name, and which node types can accept a user-given name. We'll explain how to create a new node, a new attribute, and a new element (tag).

In this column you will learn:

• How to determine legal parents and possible child types
• How to set the node name
• How to create a new general node
• How to create a new element (tag) node
• How to create a new attribute node