Re: DOM L3 XPath question

Vivek Pandey wrote:

>
>
> Ray Whitmer wrote:
>
>> It means that the evaluate method may reuse the result parameter as 
>> the result object.
>
> Thats what i understood from the spec. But i am not finding info on:
>
> * How does result object passed as parameter be reused by the evaluate 
> function? I mean can it be used by the application for iterative 
> evaluation?
> * Is the *reuse *of result object is implementation dependant?
> * In *Issue XPath-30*, the Resolution says for some use case it may be 
> required. Is there anywhere i can find more info?

* The purpose of reuse of XPathResult is that, for efficiency, your 
implementation may be able to reuse a previously-created object instead 
of creating a new one.  A number of implementers thought this was 
important.  Others thought it was not important.

It is implementation-dependent whether the evaluate method reuses and 
returns the passed-in XPathResult (if any) or creates a new one.

In the official last-call issues list for DOM Level 3 XPath, there is no 
Issue-30.

The use case for which people want to use it is the one described above, 
that I marked with *.  For example:

var result = null;
var i = 0;

for (i = 0; i < e.length; i++) {

  result = e.evaluate(expression[i], mynode, 0, resolver, result);
  [...]
}

In this type of a loop, an implementation that can easily reuse a result 
object would only create a single result instead of creating one every 
time evaluate was called.

An implementation is free, however to reuse all, some, or none of the 
results passed to it.  In some implementation, therefore, result would 
be a different object each time the loop was executed.  Or an 
implementation may choose to only reuse the result when the resultType 
was the same, etc.

If we are not going to rely on normal deallocation / allocation every 
time, the application is the only one to know when the result might be 
reused, which is why the application has to pass it in as a parameter 
for reuse for implementations to reuse it if they so choose.

I hope that this is helpful.

Ray Whitmer
rayw@netscape.com

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2002 20:22:47 UTC