Re: Issue #170: "Referencing Data missing from the message"

Jacek Kopecky wrote:

> 
>  My major position is that we should disallow external references
> altogether for they bring so much trouble and are inconsistent
> with the usual RPC approach to data.
>  The two major problems are
>  1) missing data and
>  2) typing of the external data.
>  The one major gain is SOAP w/Attachments. Attachments can be
> implemented in a different way very easily:
> 
>  <linkToAttachment xsi:type="att:AttachmentReference">
>    cid:...
>  </linkToAttachment>
> 
> And this would be quite the same as the way Maps etc. are being
> represented now. Who thinks attachments are more important and
> used more widely than maps?
>  If we get rid of external references, the missing data problem
> will stay, but then it would IMHO be apparent that such case is a
> fault.
> 

+1 on Jacek's position. Disallowing external references as graph edges 
(e.g. by use of IDREF instead of a general link for edges) within the 
encoding is IMO a very worthwhile simplification. Just to reiterate 
Jacek's point: this doesn't mean that external links can't be carried as 
values as shown above, it just means that such links are considered to 
be application data rather than being something that the SOAP processor 
has to deal with as part of encoding [de]serialisation.

Marc.

-- 
Marc Hadley <marc.hadley@sun.com>
XML Technology Centre, Sun Microsystems.

Received on Thursday, 3 January 2002 12:27:07 UTC