Encoding: multistructs, generic compound types

 Hi all. 8-)
 At the F2F, when generating test cases for Encoding, I
once again stumbled upon this issue in the SOAP Encoding, and
this time I finally haven't forgotten about it:
 The Encoding permits so called generic compound type (see
section 4.4.3, [1]), especially "compound types having a mixture
of accessors distinguished by name and accessors distinguished by
both name and ordinal position" - sometimes called multistructs,
a name I'll adopt here as well.
 SOAP Encoding is modeled according to the usual and common
programming language data model - primitive values, structures
and arrays. Multistructs are not common in programming languages
AFAIK, it's also not clear how to represent them in programming
languages like Java or C/C++.
 So much for the issue I have. 8-)

 Now on to my proposal:
 Multistructs can be modeled as structs with some members being
arrays, and that is IMO a very natural way of representing data
structures, which can contain more than one value under one
accessor.
 Therefore I propose we remove the part of section 4.4.3 from the
second paragraph till the end of the section. The first paragraph
should stay, I think.

 With my SOAP implementor's hat on (not the top hat 8-) ), I'd
like to point out that I know of no implementation that supports
multistructs.
 Best regards,

                   Jacek Kopecky

                   Senior Architect, Systinet (formerly Idoox)
                   http://www.systinet.com/

[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/1/08/29/soap12-part2.html#b1b2b4b8c22c14

Received on Sunday, 9 December 2001 13:32:35 UTC