WLS6 Updating XALAN + XERCES

Question

Is there an easy way to update the internal versions of XERCES and
XALAN that Weblogic uses?
There are a few bugs in XALAN 1.2 that I would rather not have to deal
with right now.
I created an XML Registry, but I believe this only applies to the XML
Parser and not the XSL Processor.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks.
Dylan Parker

Answer 1

They were renamed because people were doing just what you describe --
replacing the implementation internal to WLS' XML functions. Because we had
not build the product with the new versions of the parser, changing the
implementation would break our product. So, we changed the package names to
protect them.
Michael Girdley
BEA Systems
Learning WebLogic? http://learnweblogic.com
"Barry Dunne" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
I think the questions is really why did BEA change the package names ofthe
xalan/xerces classes.
If they had just kept the standard ones everything would have been fine,we
could just have put the new version ahead of it in the classpath.
I had the following problem when I migrated a bean that returned xml from
WL5.1 to WL6.0:
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import org.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
DocumentImpl doc = (DocumentImpl) db.newDocument();
Doing this I got a ClassCastException when the last line executes, the
newDocument() method returns a
weblogic.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl
but I want an
org.apache.xerces.dom.DocumentImpl
To get around that problem you can tell the Factory which implementationto
use by adding 3 lines of code to the sample above:
String oldXMLFactory =
System.getProperty("javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory");
System.setProperty("javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory",
"org.apache.xerces.jaxp.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl");
DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
DocumentBuilder db = dbf.newDocumentBuilder();
System.setProperty("javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory",
oldXMLFactory);
DocumentImpl doc = (DocumentImpl) db.newDocument();
This will let WebLogic use it's own xml classes internally, and let youuse
xerces1.3 for your own work.
I don't know about xalan as I have not used it but I hope that helps.
Barry.
"Dylan" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Is there an easy way to update the internal versions of XERCES and
XALAN that Weblogic uses?
There are a few bugs in XALAN 1.2 that I would rather not have to deal
with right now.
I created an XML Registry, but I believe this only applies to the XML
Parser and not the XSL Processor.
Any help appreciated.
Thanks.
Dylan Parker