Thread: need some help with transmitting and receiving xml via java urls

i think i just need to transmit using a java URL class and a URLConnection class

Yes, it is possible to use URLConnection with POST to send your data along.

so should i create a java class that has some strings with all the xml elements and attributes and then append values to the strings once i know the values from the database ? use a hashtable for attributes and values ? or just create a class with like 20 or so strings and keep appending values to them and then just use a stream connected to the URLConnection ?

the xml would be something like
<notify file="file1" location="file///c:\files"
<file types>
file one="mpg"
file two="jpeg"
</file types>
</notify>
--- but there would be alot more xml elements and tags than that - not tons though

so my class would just have a bunch of string with those element names and attributes ? and then i need to consider how they are nested ? seems like it could look messy.

My suggested solution is to use org.w3c.dom packages to build the XML document structure then convert it to String representation.

This example build the XML document:

            DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
            Document document = builder.newDocument();
 
            Element root = document.createElement("ULM");
            addSender(document, root, agent);
 
            Element messageElement = document.createElement("MESSAGE");
            messageElement.setAttribute("type", Constants.AGENT_ALIVE);
 
            Element paramElement = document.createElement("PARAM");
            paramElement.setAttribute("type", "useridletime");
            paramElement.setTextContent(String.valueOf(userIdleTime));
 
            messageElement.appendChild(paramElement);
 
            paramElement = document.createElement("PARAM");
            paramElement.setAttribute("type", "projectid");
            paramElement.setTextContent(String.valueOf(agent.getProjectId()));
 
            messageElement.appendChild(paramElement);
 
            if (!"".equals(localVariableProjectName)) {
                paramElement = document.createElement("PARAM");
                paramElement.setAttribute("type", "localvariableprojectname");
                paramElement.setTextContent(localVariableProjectName);
            }
 
            messageElement.appendChild(paramElement);
 
            root.appendChild(messageElement);
            document.appendChild(root);
 
            return documentToString(document);

The method documentToString() will output a String representation for the XML document:

        String xml = "";
        try {
            Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
            StreamResult result = new StreamResult(new StringWriter());
            DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
            transformer.transform(source, result);
            xml = result.getWriter().toString();
        } catch (TransformerConfigurationException ex) {
            logger.error(ex.getMessage(), ex);
            throw new XMLParsingException(ex);
        } catch (TransformerException ex) {
            logger.error(ex.getMessage(), ex);
            throw new XMLParsingException(ex);
        }
 
        return xml;

You then would use this String as a parameter to be sent along with POST message via URLConnection.

but more importantly how do i set up the asynchronous listener ?

What do you mean by async listener? I do not get this point?

and how the posting thread and receiving thread would be updating the database for info on those files processed

Use JDBC and a RDBMS like MySQL.

immutable objects