Using Jakarta Digester with unlimited nested elements - how?

From: Gary Smart (gary_smart_at_acslink.net.au)
Date: 12/22/03 

Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 00:09:10 GMT

Hello.

I've been searching news groups and apache and google, but can't solve
this one:

I have an XML file used to create menu items in a Swing UI. I have a
<menu> element that can have an unlimited number of other <menu>
elements. So for a menu structure like Tools|Options|Email, the XML
would be similar to:

<desktop>
   <menus>
     <menu> <-- Top Level Menu to be installed on a JMenuBar
       <name>Tools</name>
         <menu> <-- Sub Menu installed under "Tools"
            <name>Options</name>
             <action>au.com.smarttours.actions.EmailOptionsAction</action>
         </menu>
     <menu>
   </menus>
</desktop>

The <action> becomes the "Email" menu item.

I've been trying to use Jakarta Commons Digestor to parse the XML, but
cannot get it to successfully capture the nested <menu> elements. I've
tried the following with no success (d is a Digester instance):

         d.addObjectCreate("desktop/menus/*/menu", MenuInstaller.class);
         d.addCallMethod("desktop/menus/*/menu/name", "setMenuName", 0);
         d.addCallMethod("desktop/menus/*/menu/before", "addBefore", 0);
         d.addCallMethod("desktop/menus/*/menu/after", "addAfter", 0);

I thought this would work, but Digester logs "No rules found matching
'desktop/menus/menu'"

Other tried variations include:
    desktop/menus/menu (This only captures the first menu (Tools), as I
expected)

   desktop/menus/*menu
   */menu (getting dsperate!)
   *menu (getting desperate!)

The project has been using Digester for other (non-unlimited-nesting)
xml parsing successfully, so I'm trying to continue using it before
having to switch to JDOM or JAXP or something else. I reasonably suspect
that Digestor should be able to handle this?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Gary.

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