- From: <Noah_Mendelsohn@lotus.com>
- Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 14:22:50 -0400
- To: Sami Khoury <sami@whatuwant.net>
- Cc: der@hplb.hpl.hp.com, xml-dist-app@w3.org
For better or worse, I am not aware of any standard means of doing this in SOAP version 1.1, but SOAP does now allow you to define your own encodings for data. It is straightforward to do an encoding which would represent either some particular XML schema, or schemas in general. In other words, you can send your own XML. I do think this is something that the soap community should consider doing in a standardized manner, but in the meantime you can make ad hoc agreements with your friends. This does raise a philosophical question: if you believe that SOAP is only and fundamentally about RPC to invoke programming language constructs, then the above is a misuse of the coding mechanism, since the XML you would be transmitting would not necessarily map well to the structs and arrays discussed in SOAP chapter 5. If you believe, as I do, that version 1.1 is specifically to lay the groundwork for using SOAP for messaging models beyond RPC, then such encoding becomes a natural and straightforward thing to do. In general, you might want to take this discussion to the SOAP mailing list (SOAP@DISCUSS.DEVELOP.COM). Thank you, ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Noah Mendelsohn Voice: 1-617-693-4036 Lotus Development Corp. Fax: 1-617-693-8676 One Rogers Street Cambridge, MA 02142 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sami Khoury <sami@whatuwant.net> Sent by: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org 05/08/00 02:11 PM To: "'Dave Reynolds'" <der@hplb.hpl.hp.com>, xml-dist-app@w3.org cc: (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/CAM/Lotus) Subject: RE: Question re: XML embedding in XML-dist protocols You're not unusual for trying to do this :-) ICE supports this out of the box (the item that is sent may be an entire XML node tree). However, if your application is more about simple method invocation than syndication, SOAP or XML-RPC might be more relevant. Sami -----Original Message----- From: Dave Reynolds [mailto:der@hplb.hpl.hp.com] Sent: Monday, May 08, 2000 9:01 AM To: xml-dist-app@w3.org Subject: Question re: XML embedding in XML-dist protocols One of the attractions to me in using an XML-based protocol is that it should be easy to exchange information already encoded in XML. For example, as part of a command I might like to be able to pass a block of metadata encoded in RDF, or a signed assertion encoded using XMLSignature, or an embedded web document fragment in raw XML. To be clear, I'm not talking about just sending such an XML packet over HTTP (an easy job) I'd like the packet to be one of a number of parameters to a service and to use some RPC mechanism to encode the other parameters. The protocols I've looked at so far (XML-RPC, SOAP 1.0 and 1.1) provide serialization algorithms for conveying standard datatypes over XML. They don't seem to include any hooks for including a datatype to represent an embedded XML node tree which I could include within the payload. Soap 1.1 would *allow* me to define such a thing by using the encodingStyle attribute but doesn't seem to have such a thing out of the box. I guess I'm looking for an <embedded-xml> element which would prevent the deserialization algorithm descending further and would expose the XML sub-tree to the client/server as a DOM (or DOM2, or jdom or whatever) node for further parsing. So: 1. Is this a reasonable sort of requirement? Am I just unusual in even trying to do this! 2. Is there some capability along these lines already available or planned? Dave Reynolds ------------------------------------------------------------------ Hewlett-Packard Laboratories | Phone: +44-117-3128165 Filton Road, Stoke Gifford | FAX: +44-117-3128924 Bristol BS34 8QZ, UK | der@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Received on Monday, 8 May 2000 14:28:08 UTC