RE: How to add more transports/protocols to XProc?

Adina,

The most natural way to accomplish this is by using extension steps. Basically, you would be adding new "black boxes" to your pipeline that do the things that you want - executing SQL queries, making SOAP requests etc. We have done this quite often at EMC and this approach actually works quite nicely.

One thing to note is that you should be careful about ensuring that the steps are executed in the right order. In a workflow situation, this is typically quite important. It is therefore a good practice that the extension steps have input ports and output ports, so that you can easily express dependencies between the steps by adding explicit connections (p:pipe bindings). In some situations it doesn't matter, but you typically want to prevent the XProc processor from "randomly" deciding the execution order of the steps in the pipeline.

Regards,
Vojtech


--
Vojtech Toman
Consultant Software Engineer
EMC | Information Intelligence Group
vojtech.toman@emc.com
http://developer.emc.com/xmltech

From: xproc-dev-request@w3.org [mailto:xproc-dev-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Adina Gupta
Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 8:26 PM
To: xproc-dev@w3.org
Subject: How to add more transports/protocols to XProc?

Hi!

I'm wondering how could I use XProc to form a workflow to do things that are not directly related to XML or the kind. For example, Calling SQL queries/stored procedures, communication over plain udp/tcp sockets etc.

More precisely my workflow would be to couple a few sql select queries, a few stored procedure calls and then based on the output plug some sockets and write/read data over them, transform the response and that's it return an output XML.

Is it possible? If yes then what's the best way of writing connectors for such transports? An extension step or may be something else?

Adina