xgenjs

A Javascript implementation of xGenPaths.

xgenjs enables using simple XPath like statementsto generate XML.

The following xGenPath will create the expected XML output.

div#container/table.table/tbody/tr/td[5]

xGenPaths were designed for generating XML documents but also serve generating HTML DOM elements.

Generating XML server side

xgenjs uses standard (DOM APIs)[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DOMImplementation] of which there are a few implementations for nodejs. The code is tested with (xmldom)[https://github.com/jindw/xmldom], any DOM that conforms to DOM Level 2 should work.

Typical code is as follows (HTML schema used as an example)

    var XGen = require('xgenjs').XGen;
    
    // Create a new XML document
    var xGen = new XGen();
    xGen.newDocument("/html{lang=en}/head/title").setTextContent(TITLE);
    
    // select() and create() calls used to generate XML.
    xGen
        .select("//html")
        .create("body/div#container/div#menu/ul/li[5]");
    
    xGen
        .select("//body")
        .create("div#footer/footer/span.small/a")
        .setTextContent("Built with xgenjs")
        .setAttribute("href", "https://github.com/teknopaul/xgenjs");

xGenPaths create elements at a given points in the DOM tree, server side the technology used to select() is xpath. N.B. XPaths and xGenPaths are not the same.

Syntax of xGenPaths can be found here SYNTAX

Generating XML client side

xgenjs can also be used to create XML on the client side. Either to generate HTML to insert into the current page or XML to send via AJAX.

The select() method in the browser typically uses CSS Selectors, ala jQuery. It can also use XPaths if a Javascript implementation of xpath is loaded.

XGen can also integrate to jQuery providing the $.create(xGenPath) method which when used like this returns a jQeury NodeList.