Parsing XML document fragments with validation

The validating parser provides support for parsing XML document fragments. The W3C XML specification allows parsing of such document fragments as external parsed entities. The document fragment can be the value of a single attribute, as well as a single element and its descendants. It may be followed by comments and processing instructions. The parser must be provided ancestor and namespace context information to ensure proper validation.

The following example illustrates the usefulness of validating parser support for parsing XML document fragments. Consider a large XML document representing an employee list of the form:

<root>
   <Person>
      <name mgr = "NO">Bill</name>
      <age>60</age>
   </Person>
   ....
   <Person>
      <name mgr = "NO">Joe</name>
      <age>45</age>
   </Person>
</root>

Each Person element is a fragment. If the caller wants to add another Person element fragment and validate that it adheres to an associated schema, with validating fragment support, the caller can perform a validating parse of just the individual fragment to be added and then insert the fragment into the document. Prior to this support, the caller would have had to perform a validating parse of the entire document after inserting the new fragment.

For more information on parsing document fragments, see Parsing XML document fragments with validation.

Note: The non-validating parser does not support fragment parsing.