RE: Third party datatype request

The list is very limited and does not even include the fundamental
dimensions of mass, time, length and electrical charge that all the other
units are derived from.  Trying to enumerate dimensional units is a very
complicated undertaking.  However, you could be able to leverage other
efforts in this field.  I just ran across a reference to UN/EDIFACT's
Recommendation 20 (http://www.unece.org/cefact/rec/rec20en.htm) in Ariba's
cXML draft.  I would seem a reasonable solution to allow a datatype to have
an attribute that corresponding to the numeric or alpha code for the
datatype's dimensional unit, roughly

<!--  This would indicate that attributes or content that has the length
datatype
         is expressed in a manner compatible with the real datatype and
should be
         intrepreted as being in meters.    -->
<datatype name="length" unit="MTR">
	<basetype name="real"/>
</datatype>

I haven't downloaded the whole recommendation to see if it covers all the
datatypes in the original message, but I would guess that it would be
sufficient.    It's declared scope is an comprehensive set of units
currently used for trade.

The suggestion does not require any additional functionality from XML
processors.  It simply allows the schema author to specify the intended
dimensional units for a datatype.  For example, if the Width element was
defined referencing the previous definition of length

<elementType name="Width">
	<datatype name="length"/>
</elementType>


Then the following fragment would say the parking lot is 30 meters wide.

<ParkingLot>
	<Width>30</Width>
</ParkingLot>

Received on Monday, 16 August 1999 17:04:44 UTC