How can I get more information on an invalid DOM element through the Validator?

Question

I am validating an in-memory DOM object using the javax.xml.validation.Validator class against an XSD schema. I am getting a SAXParseException bein

Answer 1

If you are using Xerces (the Sun JDK default), you can get the element that failed validation through the http://apache.org/xml/properties/dom/current-element-node property:

...
catch (SAXParseException e)
{
    Element curElement = (Element)validator.getProperty("http://apache.org/xml/properties/dom/current-element-node");

    System.out.println("Validation error: " + e.getMessage());
    System.out.println("Element: " + curElement);
}   

Example:

String xml = "\n" +
             "This is text\n" +
             "32\n" +
             "abc\n" +
             "";

DocumentBuilderFactory dbf = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dbf.setNamespaceAware(true);
Document doc = dbf.newDocumentBuilder().parse(new ByteArrayInputStream(xml.getBytes("UTF-8")));
Schema schema = getSchema(getClass().getResource("myschema.xsd"));

Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
try
{
    validator.validate(new DOMSource(doc));
}
catch (SAXParseException e)
{
    Element curElement = (Element)validator.getProperty("http://apache.org/xml/properties/dom/current-element-node");

    System.out.println("Validation error: " + e.getMessage());
    System.out.println(curElement.getLocalName() + ": " + curElement.getTextContent());

    //Use curElement.getParentNode() or whatever you need here
}         

If you need to get line/column numbers from the DOM, this answer has a solution to that problem.