Problem with parsing large xml files

Question

Hello All,
I am parsing a large xml file of 20MB and I use DocumentBuilder.parse(File). This method works for small xml files with size less than 20MB but the application hangs and doesn't through any error message when parsing 20MB xml files. Please let me know what I have to do at this point ?
Thanks & Regards,
Kumar.

Answer 1

Well... i can't agree.
If you have such structure:
<task>
  <task/>
  <task>
     <task>
        <task/>
     </task>
     <task/>
  </task>
</task>
...you may always keep stack of tasks (at startElement push to top, and at endElement pop), so at every leaf of tree you will have all parents of that leaf.
for such structure:
<task id="1" parent="0"/>
<task id="2" parent="1"/>
<task id="3" parent="1"/>
<task id="4" parent="2"/>
<task id="5" parent="3"/>
...it will be much faster to go thro document by sax several times to build tree of tasks, than to load all document into memory...