OuterXml for Java

Java can be extremely frustrating, particularily because there always seems to be many many different ways to do a simple task. For example, I needed to get a fragment from an XML document which seems easy enough. .NET has the XmlNode class which has a property OuterXml. Done. However, no such simple equivalent exists for Java, at least in my limited experience. I don't claim to be an XML expert, so I'm not about to write a diatribe. After a couple of hours, I found this guy's blog, which I used as a basis for the method below. You can figure out how to get a org.w3c.dom.Node object, that's another painful tale...

public static String getOuterXml(Node node)
    throws TransformerConfigurationException, TransformerException
{
    Transformer transformer = TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
    transformer.setOutputProperty("omit-xml-declaration", "yes");

    StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
    transformer.transform(new DOMSource(node), new StreamResult(writer));
    return writer.toString();         
}

Windows Firewall for FTP

This is silly, but it hung me up for more than a few minutes. I was trying to FTP from a laptop to my desktop PC (running Microsoft's IIS FTP server). The client would claim it was connected, then after a few seconds, report "Connection closed by remote host." So I'm guessing it's a firewall problem, and I'm right (for a change), but it was still not easy to find. So below are the screen shots of the magical checkbox I needed to check.

Random Password Generator

I needed to create a random password. First I found this short method, which didn't work. Then I found this guy agreed with me. His code works, but not so hot in my test program. The parameterless Random constructor uses a time-based seed value (per millisecond?) so there are duplicates. The code I ended up with reuses a single Random member.

Then there's the holy grail, which was too much for the requirements I was working with, eight alphanumeric digits only. Simplicity is divine.

private Random m_random = new Random();

public string CreateRandomPassword(int length)
{
    char[] chars = new char[length];

    int index = 0;
    while (index < length)
    {
        char c = (char)m_random.Next(48, 122);
        if (Char.IsLetterOrDigit(c))
        {
            chars[index] = c;
            index++;
        }
    }

    return new string(chars);
}