Interface Entity

This interface represents a known entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an XML document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity declaration.

The nodeName attribute that is inherited from Node contains the name of the entity.

An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no EntityReference nodes in the document tree.

XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in the external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications, and that the replacement text of the entity may not be available. When the replacement text is available, the corresponding Entity node's child list represents the structure of that replacement value. Otherwise, the child list is empty.

DOM Level 3 does not support editing Entity nodes; if a user wants to make changes to the contents of an Entity, every related EntityReference node has to be replaced in the structure model by a clone of the Entity's contents, and then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones instead. Entity nodes and all their descendants are readonly.

An Entity node does not have any parent.

Note: If the entity contains an unbound namespace prefix, the namespaceURI of the corresponding node in the Entity node subtree is null. The same is true for EntityReference nodes that refer to this entity, when they are created using the createEntityReference method of the Document interface.

See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification.