I'm having a problem accessing the contents of an XML document. My goal is this: Take an XML source and parse it into a fair equivalent of an associative array, then store it as a persistable object.

the xml is pretty simple:

<root>
<element>
    <category_id>1</category_id>
    <name>Cars</name>
</element>
<element>
    <category_id>2</category_id>
    <name>Boats</name>
</element>
</root>

Basic java class below. I'm pretty much just calling save(xml) after http response above. Yes, the xml is properly formatted.

    import java.io.IOException;
    import java.util.Hashtable;

    import org.w3c.dom.Document;
    import org.w3c.dom.Node;
    import org.w3c.dom.NodeList;

    import java.util.Vector;
    import net.rim.device.api.system.PersistentObject;
    import net.rim.device.api.system.PersistentStore;
    import net.rim.device.api.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
    import net.rim.device.api.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;

public class database{
        private static PersistentObject storeVenue;
        static final long key = 0x2ba5f8081f7ef332L;
        public Hashtable hashtable;
        public Vector venue_list;
        String _node,_element;

    public database()
    {
        storeVenue = PersistentStore.getPersistentObject(key);
    }

    public void save(Document xml)
    {
            venue_list = new Vector();
        storeVenue.setContents(venue_list);


        Hashtable categories = new Hashtable();


        try{

            DocumentBuilderFactory docBuilderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory. newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder docBuilder = docBuilderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
            docBuilder.isValidating();

            xml.getDocumentElement ().normalize ();

            NodeList list=xml.getElementsByTagName("*");
            _node=new String();
            _element = new String();

            for (int i=0;i<list.getLength();i++){

                Node value=list.item(i).getChildNodes().item(0);
                _node=list.item(i).getNodeName();
                _element=value.getNodeValue();

                categories.put(_element, _node);
            }

        }
        catch (Exception e){
            System.out.println(e.toString());
        }

        venue_list.addElement(categories);


        storeVenue.commit();
    }

The code above is the work in progress, and is most likely heavily flawed. However, I have been at this for days now. I can never seem to get all child nodes, or the name / value pair. When I print out the vector as a string, I usually end up with results like this: [{ = root, = element}] and that's it. No "category_id", no "name"

Ideally, I would end up with something like [{1 = cars, 2 = boats}]

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks