Using DOMXml and Xpath, to update XML entries - php

Question

Hello I know there is many questions here about those three topics combined together to update XML entries, but it seems everyone is very specific to a given problem.
I have been spending some time trying to understand XPath and its way, but I still can't get what I need to do.
Here we go
I have this XML file
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<storagehouse xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="schema.xsd">
<item id="c7278e33ef0f4aff88da10dfeeaaae7a">
<name>HDMI Cable 3m</name>
<weight>0.5</weight>
<category>Cables</category>
<location>B3</location>
</item>
<item id="df799fb47bc1e13f3e1c8b04ebd16a96">
<name>Dell U2410</name>
<weight>2.5</weight>
<category>Monitors</category>
<location>C2</location>
</item>
</storagehouse>
What I would like to do is to update/edit any of the nodes above when I need to. I will do a Html form for that.
But my biggest conserne is how do I find and update a the desired node and update it?
Here I have some of what I am trying to do
<?php
function fnDOMEditElementCond()
{
$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->load('storage.xml');
$library = $dom->documentElement;
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);
// I kind of understand this one here
$result = $xpath->query('/storagehouse/item[1]/name');
//This one not so much
$result->item(0)->nodeValue .= ' Series';
// This will remove the CDATA property of the element.
//To retain it, delete this element (see delete eg) & recreate it with CDATA (see create xml eg).
//2nd Way
//$result = $xpath->query('/library/book[author="J.R.R.Tolkein"]');
// $result->item(0)->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->nodeValue .= ' Series';
header("Content-type: text/xml");
echo $dom->saveXML();
}
?>
Could someone maybe give me an examples with attributes and so on, so one a user decides to update a desired node, I could find that node with XPath and then update it?

Answer 1

The following example is making use of simplexml which is a close friend of DOMDocument. The xpath shown is the same regardless which method you use, and I use simplexml here to keep the code low. I'll show a more advanced DOMDocument example later on.
So about the xpath: How to find the node and update it. First of all how to find the node:
The node has the element/tagname item. You are looking for it inside the storagehouse element, which is the root element of your XML document. All item elements in your document are expressed like this in xpath:
/storagehouse/item
From the root, first storagehouse, then item. Divided with /. You already know that, so the interesting part is how to only take those item elements that have the specific ID. For that the predicate is used and added at the end:
/storagehouse/item[#id="id"]
This will return all item elements again, but this time only those which have the attribute id with the value id (string). For example in your case with the following XML:
$xml = <<<XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<storagehouse xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="schema.xsd">
<item id="c7278e33ef0f4aff88da10dfeeaaae7a">
<name>HDMI Cable 3m</name>
<weight>0.5</weight>
<category>Cables</category>
<location>B3</location>
</item>
<item id="df799fb47bc1e13f3e1c8b04ebd16a96">
<name>Dell U2410</name>
<weight>2.5</weight>
<category>Monitors</category>
<location>C2</location>
</item>
</storagehouse>
XML;
that xpath:
/storagehouse/item[#id="df799fb47bc1e13f3e1c8b04ebd16a96"]
will return the computer monitor (because such an item with that id exists). If there would be multiple items with the same id value, multiple would be returned. If there were none, none would be returned. So let's wrap that into a code-example:
$simplexml = simplexml_load_string($xml);
$result = $simplexml->xpath(sprintf('/storagehouse/item[#id="%s"]', $id));
if (!$result || count($result) !== 1) {
throw new Exception(sprintf('Item with id "%s" does not exists or is not unique.', $id));
}
list($item) = $result;
In this example, $titem is the SimpleXMLElement object of that computer monitor xml element name item.
So now for the changes, which are extremely easy with SimpleXML in your case:
$item->category = 'LCD Monitor';
And to finally see the result:
echo $simplexml->asXML();
Yes that's all with SimpleXML in your case.
If you want to do this with DOMDocument, it works quite similar. However, for updating an element's value, you need to access the child element of that item as well. Let's see the following example which first of all fetches the item as well. If you compare with the SimpleXML example above, you can see that things not really differ:
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadXML($xml);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$result = $xpath->query(sprintf('/storagehouse/item[#id="%s"]', $id));
if (!$result || $result->length !== 1) {
throw new Exception(sprintf('Item with id "%s" does not exists or is not unique.', $id));
}
$item = $result->item(0);
Again, $item contains the item XML element of the computer monitor. But this time as a DOMElement. To modify the category element in there (or more precisely it's nodeValue), that children needs to be obtained first. You can do this again with xpath, but this time with an expression relative to the $item element:
./category
Assuming that there always is a category child-element in the item element, this could be written as such:
$category = $xpath->query('./category', $item)->item(0);
$category does now contain the first category child element of $item. What's left is updating the value of it:
$category->nodeValue = "LCD Monitor";
And to finally see the result:
echo $doc->saveXML();
And that's it. Whether you choose SimpleXML or DOMDocument, that depends on your needs. You can even switch between both. You probably might want to map and check for changes:
$repository = new Repository($xml);
$item = $repository->getItemByID($id);
$item->category = 'LCD Monitor';
$repository->saveChanges();
echo $repository->getXML();
Naturally this requires more code, which is too much for this answer.