7 Nov
2011
7 Nov
'11
8:07 a.m.
Hi Norbert,
thanks a lot for your extensive reply.
I don't know the simpleXO stuff.
If you like, please load it from Cincom public repository and play a bit.
The Pharo port will take some additional time.
Cdata is associated with primitive types. But then in
your "width"
mapping you map an element to a native type. That makes only sense if
this a convenient way of writing it.
My idea behind the name 'cdata' was to hint that these types use the
string-value (see XPath) of an XML node to build objects. I had in mind
that these types should not be restricted to simple (schema) types. E.g. a
use case requires to extract the text from an html paragraph element:
<p>This is an <em>emphasized text</em>.</p>
<div><p>And this a text as well.</p></div>
"Consider the mapping"
doc := (builder defineElement: 'Document' class: 'OrderedCollection').
doc mapPath: (RootStep // 'p') toType: 'Paragraph') setter: #add:.
(builder defineCData: 'Paragraph' class: 'Text')
constructor: #fromString:.
"Which gives us"
(OrderedCollection new)
add: (Text fromString: 'This is an emph ...');
add: (Text fromString: 'And this is ...')
What's your opinion on that example? Are 'element' and 'cdata' still
misleading?
I am not sure whether 'simple' and 'complex' reflect the nature of the
types well, since a cdata type my have it's own mappings as well:
text := (builder defineCData: 'Paragraph' class: 'Text')
constructor: #fromString:.
(text mapPath: (AttributeAxis ? 'id') toType: 'String') key:
'p-ids'.
This example uses the value of @id as key to allow referencing the created
object elsewhere. A more sophisticated example could use a parser that
parses a given string-value and the fields of the result are set by
SimpleXO later.
I am looking forward to your (and anyone else's) thoughts!
Regards,
Steffen