[Bug 9065] [XQ31ReqUC] eval()

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=9065

Roger Costello <costello@mitre.org> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |costello@mitre.org
          Component|XQuery 3.1 Requirements and |XPath 3.1
                   |Use Cases                   |

--- Comment #2 from Roger Costello <costello@mitre.org> ---
I am submitting this on behalf of Carole Mahoney:

Dear Members of the W3C XPath, XQuery, and XSLT Working Groups,

I am a department head overseeing software engineering staff who support
multiple U.S. Federal government projects. Many of the projects we support 
would benefit enormously from the ability to dynamically evaluate strings as
XPath. I would like to request that a new XPath function be added. Here are
several use cases followed by a description of the desired XPath function:

In one project there is an application that evaluates a series of XML
documents; each document is evaluated based on a security policy. The policies
are expressed as XPath, in a separate XML file. The application identifies
suspicious nodes in the XML documents, bookmarks them using the XPath 3.0
path() function [1], and then generates a report showing the XPath to the
suspicious nodes along with a description of the policy that has been violated.
Then a security expert conducts a Reliable Human Review (RHR) of the report.
Periodically the policies are modified. This currently involves stopping the
application, reconfiguring the code, reaccrediting the code, and then
reinstalling the application. This is extremely expensive and time-consuming.
With a function that evaluates arbitrary XPath expressions our policy file
could be updated and the application could dynamically evaluate the new
policies. Thus, there would be no need to stop the application, reaccredit, and
reinstall; this would result in a huge decrease in cost and a huge gain in
efficiency. 

In another project we have operational rules, such as aircraft fuel consumption
calculations and aircraft flight performance characteristics, expressed in
XPath. These rules can be made more easily configurable if they are held in a
separate file maintained by an operational expert. With a function that
evaluates arbitrary XPath expressions, we will be able to have an application
that reads in the operational rules and dynamically evaluates them.

Several projects have this situation: a user enters an XPath string that
described how he wants data sorted or grouped. That is, the sort key and the
grouping key are specified as external XPath expressions. An application then
reads in the XPath string and dynamically evaluates them to sort/group the
data.

Some projects want to use XPointer-like schemes for cross-referencing within or
across documents using XPath expressions.

Our test teams would like to create test frameworks which use XPath expressions
to make test assertions.

As you can see, we have important use cases in numerous projects that would
benefit from the ability to dynamically evaluate strings as XPath expressions.

We are aware that a detailed specification of such a function will require
definition of the static and dynamic context for the XPath evaluation. However,
we think that the need for this is reduced by the new EQNames which make it
possible to write XPath expressions with no dependency on the namespace
context.

We are aware that some of the traditional use cases for dynamic evaluation are
(better) handled using higher order functions; however, HOFs do not tackle all
requirements.

We want this new functionality to be XPath that is evaluated because this new
function will be used in our XQuery code, as well as our XSLT, Schematron, and
XML Schema 1.1 code.

We humbly request that Working Groups provide a new function that takes one
argument which is an arbitrary XPath expression, represented as a string, and
returns the corresponding items. Perhaps it could be called: xpath-eval(), or
some such thing. 

We imagine the new function behaving like this:

                xpath-eval('arbitrary xpath expression')

evaluate the string (which could be a map, a path expression, a function, etc.)
and returns a sequence of items.

Thank you for your consideration.


Carole

Carole Mahoney
Department Head
E54C – Agile and Adaptive Software Engineering
The MITRE Corporation
202 Burlington Road
Bedford, MA 01730
781-271-8737
cmahoney@mitre.org

[1] The path() function is described here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath-functions-30/#func-path

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Received on Friday, 6 September 2013 09:13:50 UTC