How to get an element with XPath?

[miki landon]

Hi,

I have an xml file I would like to update everytime there's a change.

I would like to change the start element from time to time.
But I can't get the start node, it's only returning as a String.
Can someone please help me with this.

 
<databases>
  <!--Just a thought-->
  <client name="DB1">
    <sync mode="full">
      <start>2010-03-01 06:00:00<start>
      <next>2010-03-01 06:00:00</next>
    </sync>
  </client>
</databases>  

Here is my code

public void update(String db, String mode, String start, String next)
{	

	DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
	DocumentBuilder docBuilder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
	FileInputStream inputsource = new FileInputStream(new File(filename));

	Document document = docBuilder.parse(inputsource);
	XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();

	String search = "/databases/client[@name=\"" + db + "\"]/sync[@mode=\"" + mode + "\"]/start";
							
	Element startElement = (Element) (xpath.evaluate(search, document, XPathConstants.NODE));
      [b]  //start element always returning null when I ask for the node [/b]

	System.out.println(startElement) ;

	Element newLr = document.createElement("start");
	newLr.setNodeValue(lastrun);
	startElement.getParentNode().replaceChild(newLr, startElement );

		
}

[Paul Clapham]

The code isn't very helpful, because we can't tell what XPath expression you are using. Perhaps the code doesn't produce the expression you think it does.

[miki landon]

This is the xpath expression when i output from "search". Hope this will help you

/databases/client[@name="DB1"]/sync[@mode="full"]/start

I have tested my xpath in altova and they have a correct result which is

<start>2010-03-01 06:00:00<start>

[Paul Clapham]

I see your problem... you think that the toString() method of an Element will convert the Element and all of its children to XML and return that. But it doesn't. It just returns the node value. For the node value of various kinds of nodes see the API documentation for org.w3c.dom.Node; in particular notice what the node value of an Element is.