XML DOMEntity

In your DTD file, you declare entities for constants that you want to use in your XML file.

For more information on entities, see chapter 2, "XML boot camp."

In XML, five built-in entities (known as predefined entities) exist that all parsers can decipher (see table  ). Many parsers can automatically read more entities than these five, but the DOMDocument object currently only recognizes these five. The rest need to be defined in your DTDs.

0.0.1 Built-in entities that the DOMDocument automatically parses

The XMLDOMEntity object represents an entity in the childNodes property of the docType (DTD) property of the DOMDocument. So, if you want to find out what has been declared as entities in the DTD, just search through the child Nodes of the XMLDOMDocument object.

As mentioned above for the XMLDOMDocumentType object, you cannot add an entity declaration to the DTD in an XML file, as the XMLDOMDocumentType object is read-only.

This manuscript is an abridged version of a chapter from the Manning Publications book XML Programming with VB and ASP. This chapter looks at the Microsoft DOM objects. NOTE: Most images have been removed to increase speed and many of the code comments have also been removed for presentation. Please purchase the book to enjoy the full experience of all the chapters with images and code comments!