Re: NameValue and NameValueList data types

Again the focus here is on Map, but KeyValue has more uses than that so mapentry is not general enough.

I would tend to go with the approach of having key and value as separate elements rather than use attributes for use 
with soap encoding.

Pete

Noah Mendelsohn wrote:

> Mike Dierken asks:
> 
> 
>>>In XML, it's natural to do:
>>>
> 
>>>   <name-of-map>
>>>
>  >>      <name>value</name>
>  >>      <name>value</name>
> 
>>>   </name-of-map>
>>>
> 
>>>Is that how they do it?
>>>
> 
> I don't know if anyone does it this way, but there can be problems.  This
> is a natural and useful solution in the case where the keys happen to be
> comprised of legal XML name characters.  In other cases, there are common
> characters which are not allowed, and it surely does not work for binary.
> 
> This is a common trap that often comes up when XML is used, even for
> purposes as simple as dumping simple programming language structures.  If
> you have non-name characters, you have to do something about it.  There is
> indeed a proposal for escaping such characters in the names...it works, and
> is probably OK for automatically generated files.  For human readability,
> it's less convenient.  I would think that:
> 
> <name-of-map>
>  <mapentry key="keyvalue">value</mapentry>
>  <mapentry key="keyvalue2">value2</mapentry>
> </name-of-map>
> 
> would be a better compromise in terms of robustness and readability.   Of
> course, there are many variations on this theme including:
> 
> <name-of-map>
>  <mapentry>
>    <key>keyvalue</key>
>    <value>value</value>
>   </mapentry>
>  <mapentry>
>    <key>keyvalue2</key>
>    <value>value2</value>
>   </mapentry>
> </name-of-map>
> 
> This is more verbose, but it allows yet richer keys such as binary:
> 
> <name-of-map>
>  <mapentry>
>    <key xsi:type="xsd:base64Binary>..</key>
>    <value>value</value>
>   </mapentry>
> </name-of-map>
> 
> I think any of these are likely to be more robust than coding the key as
> the element name.  That said, using the element name is indeed convenient
> in the limited cases where it works.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Noah Mendelsohn                                    Voice: 1-617-693-4036
> Lotus Development Corp.                            Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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> Cambridge, MA 02142
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> 
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 21 December 2001 07:58:05 UTC