Loading XML into Java classes

Hi. Can anyone help? My friend is doing an honours project for university and is really struggling and I don't like to see her so stressed!

She is trying to implement XML using Java and has read all the notes, tutorials and everything but keeps getting exceptions when trying to load an XML file

Hopefully it's something simple but just hard to pick up.

Using w3c packages and DocumentBuilderFactory she gets an exception on xmlDoc = db.parse ( file );

Unfortunately she couldn't tell me what exception it is.

Is it to do with how she creates the file ( file = new File (filename); ) Does the full path need to be included when creating files?

Or can it be due to conflicting versions or something like that.

Basically I'm looking for anyone who is really clued up on this sort of stuff, if you can help or don't mind answering any questions based on XML and Java please can help out! Thanks!

Is she trying to load this from a web application or from a stand-alone java class? If it's a stand-alone java class "filename" needs to be the full path. If it's from a web application use ServletContext.getRealPath( filename ) where "filename" is relative to the webapp root (ie: /WEB-INF/xml/myfile.xml" ).

Here's the reference: http://java.sun.com/j2ee/sdk_1.3/te...letContext.html