Cloning node from one tree, inserting into a different tree

[Bruce Reid <b....@aristoslogic.com>]

Being new to the DOM programming world, I'm experimenting with some of the
sample apps to learn about DOM capabilities and limitations. I'm planning an
application which will need to parse multiple XML source documents, and
create from them a new document containing some components from each of the
source documents. I have successfully performed a deep clone of an element
of document1, after which my attempt to insert the new node into an element
of document2 causes a core dump.

If I modify the code so that the node being inserted is created from scratch
using document2.createElement(), then the insertion has no trouble. So I'm
wondering if cloning from one tree, and then inserting the clone into a
different tree is even possible? If it is, then there must be some subtlety
that I'm missing. If it's not possible, then the only way I can think of to
accomplish the same result would be to traverse the node to be copied, and
reconstruct it element by element in the tree to which it is to be inserted.
But that seems to inconvenient to be reasonable.

Can someone lend some advice to get me over this hump? My attempts to
analyze the core file have not provided much useful information. Even though
I have built the Xerces library with the debug option, I must not have given
the debugger sufficient search path information, because after the call to
ParentNode::insertBefore() in my own source file, the subsequent calls
leading to the crash are displayed without any of the symbolic information
that would be needed to shed more light on the problem. Any info on which
source directories should be included in the search path would also be
appreciated. I'm currently telling it to look in:
$XERCESCROOT/src/dom:$XERCESCROOT/src/parsers:$XERCESCROOT/src/util:.

Thanks for any help,
Bruce Reid