RE: proposing closing issues 26, 3, 14, 23, 32, 65, 69

Jacek wrote:

> Issue 3 basically asks us how arrays (a SOAP Data Model term) are
> declared in XML Schema. We don't deal with SOAP Encoding (nor the 
> Data Model) at the moment so I suggest we close this issue. I think 
> until we tackle SOAP Data Model fully (if ever), we shouldn't try to 
> do bits of it.

WSDL 1.1 document included a set of rules for naming and representing
ArrayOfBlah in an /encoded/ binding which greatly aided interoperability 
of for rpc/encoded exchanges.

I'd be happy to close this issue for WSDL 2.0, but poor schema support 
in many current implementations means we have a lot of interoperability
issues surrounding how data structures such as arrays may be exchanged
across a /literal/ binding. 

Also many systems need to exchange keyed data: associative arrays in 
Perl, PHP, etc, hash tables in Java, C#, Ruby and indexed table from a
database. 

Whilst I acknowledge the trend is a move away from data structures being 
directly /encoded/ in WSDL towards XML 'documents', I'm concerned that 
poor support for the whole gamut of schema in current code 
implementations means that users in a code model are left to find a lowest
common denominator of schema for themselves just to encode the most simple 
data collections.

I therefore propose we provide suggested schema extracts for representing 
a vector, a matrix and an associative array. These would not be normative, 
but would provide a well supported pattern to follow when generating code 
from WSDL and WSDL from code. 

Paul

-- 
Paul Sumner Downey
Web Services Integration
BT Exact

Received on Thursday, 18 December 2003 07:01:03 UTC