Apex Developer Guide

Apex Developer Guide
Release Notes
Getting Started with Apex
Writing Apex
Running Apex
Invoking Apex
Apex Transactions and Governor Limits
Using Salesforce Features with Apex
Integration and Apex Utilities
Invoking Callouts Using Apex
JSON Support
XML Support
Reading and Writing XML Using Streams
Reading XML Using Streams
Writing XML Using Streams
Reading and Writing XML Using the DOM
ZIP Support
Securing Your Data
Encoding Your Data
Using Patterns and Matchers
Debugging, Testing, and Deploying Apex
Apex Reference
Appendices
PDF

Reading XML Using Streams

The XMLStreamReader class methods enable forward, read-only access to XML data.
Those methods are used in conjunction with HTTP callouts to parse XML data or skip unwanted events. You can parse nested XML content that’s up to 50 nodes deep. The following example shows how to instantiate a new XmlStreamReader object:

These methods work on the following XML events:

  • An attribute event is specified for a particular element. For example, the element <book> has an attribute title: <book title="Salesforce.com for Dummies">.
  • A start element event is the opening tag for an element, for example <book>.
  • An end element event is the closing tag for an element, for example </book>.
  • A start document event is the opening tag for a document.
  • An end document event is the closing tag for a document.
  • An entity reference is an entity reference in the code, for example !ENTITY title = "My Book Title".
  • A characters event is a text character.
  • A comment event is a comment in the XML file.

Use the next and hasNext methods to iterate over XML data. Access data in XML using get methods such as the getNamespace method.

When iterating over the XML data, always check that stream data is available using hasNext before calling next to avoid attempting to read past the end of the XML data.

XmlStreamReader Example

The following example processes an XML string.