Creating New Nodes

The DOMDocument object exposes the createNode method, which allows you to create a qualified node by supplying the node type, name, and namespaceURI of the new node.

DOMDocument also exposes the following eight methods, which allow you to create specific Document Object Model (DOM) nodes.

• createAttribute method
• createCDATASection method
• createComment method
• createDocumentFragment method
• createElement method
• createEntityReference method
• createProcessingInstruction method
• createTextNode method

These methods return objects and interfaces and are described in the XML Reference. These specific objects and interfaces expose properties and methods associated with that node. For example, the following sample code assigns an XMLDOMElement object with the name of "item" to the variable xmlElem.

xmlElem = xmlDoc.createElement("item")

You can then add an attribute to that element by calling the setAttribute method and passing that method a string containing the attribute name and a string containing the attribute value.

xmlElem.setAttribute("id","bar")

Using books.xml again as an example, the following code creates a new element, PAGES, and uses the appendChild method to add it to the second child node of the root, COLLECTION. It then sets the text property for the new element to "400".

Dim xmlDoc
Dim root
Dim newElem
Set xmlDoc = CreateObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.5.0")
xmlDoc.async = False
xmlDoc.load("c:\books.xml")
If (xmlDoc.parseError.errorCode <> 0) Then
   Dim myErr
   Set myErr = xmlDoc.parseError
   MsgBox("You have error " & myErr.reason)
Else
   Set root = xmlDoc.documentElement
   Set newElem = xmlDoc.createElement("PAGES")
   root.childNodes.item(1).appendChild newElem
   root.childNodes.item(1).lastChild.text = "400"
   MsgBox root.childNodes.item(1).xml
End If

You can assign a new document to a document object by assigning the document a new root element using the documentElement property.

XMLDoc.documentElement = XMLNode

In order for this operation to work, XMLNode must be an element type node.

Note   Assigning the document object a new document element does not change the other children of the document. For example, the doctype element does not change.

See Also

Accessing the Document Tree | appendChild Method | createNode Method | documentElement Property | setAttribute Method | XML Reference