XML DOM parsing; keeping inheritance

Question

I understand xml and minidom but I am missing something. What I want to do is be able to parse a variable size XML file and be able to build a tree of the elements.

Take this example

<doc>
<foo>
    <server>
       <ip>10.1.1.1</ip>
       <service>service1</service>
       <name>somename</name>
       <something>sometext</something>
    </server>
</foo>
<foo>
    <server>
       <ip>10.1.1.2</ip>
        <service>service2</service>
        <name>other</name>
        <something>link</something>
    </server>
 </foo>
 <foo>
 <server>
       <ip>10.1.1.3</ip>
       <service>service2</service>
       <name>other2</name>
       <something>link</something>
  </server>
</foo>
</doc>

Now I want to be able to parse the tree and get association so for instance service belongs to some server. And IP belongs to this one. I want to keep the tree (with server being the key) and have all the elements stored. Than I also want to be able to search for services in all the servers or display all IPs..etc..etc..

I think I will need to build a dictionary but I don't know how I can build a nested dictionary where I have everything be based of a single key.

Answer 1

Here's my quick code. I have a list of elements implementation and a list of servers implementation(+get_dict()). This should be all you need, as based on the question, afaik.

import lxml.etree as etree

class server(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.ip = ''
        self.service = ''
        self.name = ''
        self.something = ''
    def get_dict(self):
        return {self:{'ip':self.ip,'service':self.service,'name':self.name,'something':self.something}}

class serverlist(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.servers = []
    def addserver(self,serverobject):
        if serverobject not in self.servers:
            self.servers.append(serverobject)
    def removeserver(self,serverobject):
        for s in self.servers:
            if s.get_dict() == serverobject.get_dict():
                self.servers.remove(s)
    def findserver(self,valueid,value):
        for s in self.servers:
            if s.get_dict()[s][valueid] == value:
                return s
        return None

xml = etree.fromstring(r'''<xml><foo>
    <server>
       <ip>10.1.1.1</ip>
       <service>service1</service>
       <name>somename</name>
       <something>sometext</something>
    </server>
</foo>
<foo>
    <server>
       <ip>10.1.1.2</ip>
        <service>service2</service>
        <name>other</name>
        <something>link</something>
    </server>
 </foo>
 <foo>
 <server>
       <ip>10.1.1.3</ip>
       <service>service2</service>
       <name>other2</name>
       <something>link</something>
  </server>
</foo></xml>''')

#servers as a list of items (class server)
servers1 = []
for s in list(xml):
    tempserver = server()
    tempserver.ip=s.find('.//ip').text
    tempserver.service=s.find('.//service').text
    tempserver.name = s.find('.//name').text
    tempserver.something = s.find('.//something').text
    servers1.append(tempserver)
print servers1

#servers as a list of elements
servers2 = xml.xpath('.//server')
print servers2