Converting Dom to Groovy Code

I've been looking into and learning a little Groovy on the side. One of the things I'm most interested in is learning how to use the MarkupBuilder provided by Groovy. Essentially this, in my opinion, is a much better way to parse and construct XML. As a developer I use XML almost daily. First I'm looking at integrating this into my unit tests. Today I stumbled on the DomToGroovy class and found this pretty cool. I was trying to figure out how to construct XML using Groovy. I knew what the XML looked liked, so using the DomToGroovy class I could get a good idea what the Groovy code would look like that I needed to write. Below is a sample of how to do this, and I recommend the GroovyConsole to test with.

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory
import org.codehaus.groovy.tools.xml.DomToGroovy

def xmlExample = """
<jbi:message tns="http://j2ee.netbeans.org/wsdl/rssWsdl"                                     
              type="tns:rssWsdlOperationRequest" version="1.0"
              jbi="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jbi/wsdl-11-wrapper">
         <jbi:part>
             <entrylist xmlns="http://xml.netbeans.org/schema/1.0/extensions/rssbc">
                 <entry>
                     <title>Entry 1</title>                     
                     <link>http://localhost:8000/rss/feed/entry1<link>
                     <description>First Entry</description>
                     <publishdate>Dec 7, 1976</publishdate>
                 </entry>
                 <entry>
                     <title>Entry 2</title>                      
                     <link>http://localhost:8000/rss/feed/entry2<link>
                     <description>Second Entry</description>
                     <publishdate>Dec. 7, 1976</publishdate>
                 </entry>
             </entrylist>
         </jbi:part>
     </jbi:message>
"""

def builder     = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder()
def inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(xmlExample.bytes)
def document    = builder.parse(inputStream)
def output      = new StringWriter()
def converter   = new DomToGroovy(new PrintWriter(output))

converter.print(document)
println output.toString()

The output essentially shows you what the Groovy code would look like to construct the XML that we provided.

jbi:message(type:'tns:rssWsdlOperationRequest', version:'1.0',
  xmlns:jbi:'http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jbi/wsdl-11-wrapper',
  xmlns:tns:'http://j2ee.netbeans.org/wsdl/rssWsdl') {
jbi:part) {
 EntryList(xmlns:'http://xml.netbeans.org/schema/1.0/extensions/rssbc') {
   Entry) {
     title('Entry 1')
     link('http://localhost:8000/rss/feed/entry1')
     description('First Entry')
     publishDate('Dec 7, 1976')
   }
   Entry) {
     title('Entry 2')
     link('http://localhost:8000/rss/feed/entry2')
     description('Second Entry')
     publishDate('Dec. 7, 1976')
   }
 }
}
}

I think this is a pretty slick way to quickly generate a code sample so that you can quickly get started. More to come on Groovy later......