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XML literals

</employee>

</employees>;

oXml.appendChild(<employee position=”Vice President”>

<name>Benjamin Anderson</name>

</employee>);

oXml.prependChild(<employee position=”User Interface Designer”>

<name>Michael Johnson</name>

</employee>);

oXml.insertChildBefore(oXml.child(2), <employee position=”Human Resources Manager”>

<name>Margaret Jones</name>

</employee>);

oXml.setChildren(<employee position=”President”>

<name>Richard McMichael</name>

</employee> +

<name>Rebecca Smith</name>

</employee>);

This code illustrates some of the methods discussed previously. Note that you can use XML literals in

place of

XML

objects in all methods. First, the code adds a Vice President named Benjamin Anderson to

the bottom of the list of employees. Second, a User Interface Designer named Michael Johnson is added

to the top of the list of employees. Third, A Human Resources Manager named Margaret Jones is added

just before the employee in position 2, which at this point is Jim Smith (because Michael Johnson and

Nicholas C. Zakas now come before him). Finally, all the children are replaced with President Richard

McMichael and Vice President Rebecca Smith (maybe there was a major layoff). Note, in that line, the

plus symbol between the two employee literals. This indicates that the values are contained in an

XMLList

object. The resulting XML looks like this:

<name>Richard McMichael</name>

</employee>

<name>Rebecca Smith</name>

</employee>

</employees>

There has been a lot of talk in this section about the important concepts of simple and complex content.

They are so important, in fact, that the XML object has methods to help out:

hasComplexContent()

and

hasSimpleContent()

. Each of these methods returns a Boolean value indicating whether the ele-

ment contains the type of content indicated. By rule, only one of these methods can return

true

for any

given element.

var oSimpleXml = <message>Hello World!</message>;

var oComplexXML =

<message><greeting>Hello</greeting><target>World!</target></message>

var bSimple = oSimpleXml.hasSimpleContent(); //returns true

var bComplex = oComplexXML.hasComplexContent(); //returns true

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