Writing from Java to an XML document - Simple

Question

I know there's tons of questions on writing from Java to XML on stackoverflow, but it's all too complex. I feel I have a very simple problem that I just can't figure out.

So I have a program that takes a bunch of user input and I have it currently creating and appending a text document with the results. I'll just post my writer code here:

 PrintWriter out = null;
         try {
             out = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("C:/Documents and Settings/blank/My Documents/test/test.txt", true)));
             out.println("");
             out.println("<event title=\""+titleFieldUI+"\"");
             out.println("  start=\""+monthLongUI+" "+dayLongUI+" "+yearLongUI+" 00:00:00 EST"+"\"");            
             out.println("  isDuration=\"true\"");
             out.println("  color=\""+sValue+"\"");
             out.println("  end=\""+monthLong1UI+" "+dayLong1UI+" "+yearLong1UI+" 00:00:00 EST"+"\"");
             out.println("  "+descriptionUI);
             out.println("");
             out.println("</event>");
             out.println("  <!-- Above event added by: " +System.getProperty("user.name")+" " +
                        "on: "+month+"/"+day+"/"+year+" -->");       
         }catch (IOException e) {
             System.err.println(e);
         }finally{
             if(out != null){
                 out.close();
             }
         } 

So in the end, I want it to write to an already existing XML file (which I can do by simply changing where my writer goes to). Problem is, this XML file has ONE root tag known as <data>. I need the results of my program to go on the bottom of the XML file, but come BEFORE </data>. That's the only requirement. Everything I find seems too complex and I can't figure it out..

Any help is very much appreciated!

Answer 1

You should use a decent XML API. For example, here's an example using JDOM:

import java.io.*;

import org.jdom2.*;
import org.jdom2.input.*;
import org.jdom2.output.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException, JDOMException {
        File input = new File("input.xml"); 
        Document document = new SAXBuilder().build(input);
        Element element = new Element("event");
        element.setAttribute("title", "foo");
        // etc...
        document.getRootElement().addContent(element);

        // Java 7 try-with-resources statement; use a try/finally
        // block to close the output stream if you're not using Java 7
        try(OutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("output.xml")) {
            new XMLOutputter().output(document, out);
        }
    }
}

It's really not that hard... and it'll be much, much more robust than writing it out manually. (For example, this will do the right thing if your event title contains "&" - whereas your code would have produced invalid XML.)