The Java EE 5 Tutorial

Using XMLEventWriter

The XMLEventWriter interface in the StAX event iterator API lets applications write back to an XML stream or create entirely new streams. This API can be extended, but the main API is as follows:

public interface XMLEventWriter {
    public void flush() throws XMLStreamException;
    public void close() throws XMLStreamException;
    public void add(XMLEvent e) throws XMLStreamException;
    // ... other methods not shown.

Instances of XMLEventWriter are created by an instance of XMLOutputFactory. Stream events are added iteratively, and an event cannot be modified after it has been added to an event writer instance.

Attributes, Escaping Characters, Binding Prefixes

StAX implementations are required to buffer the last StartElement until an event other than Attribute or Namespace is added or encountered in the stream. This means that when you add an Attribute or a Namespace to a stream, it is appended the current StartElement event.

You can use the Characters method to escape characters like &, <, >, and ".

The setPrefix(...) method can be used to explicitly bind a prefix for use during output, and the getPrefix(...) method can be used to get the current prefix. Note that by default, XMLEventWriter adds namespace bindings to its internal namespace map. Prefixes go out of scope after the corresponding EndElement for the event in which they are bound.