Re: SOAP 1.2 Encoding and forward references

Brad Taylor wrote:
> 
> I've have a question about section 3.1.1 in part 2 in regards to forward
> references.
> 
> Number 2 of section 3.1.1 seems to suggest that forward references may be
> allowed:
> "If the element information item representing the edge does have a ref
> attribute information item among its attributes, then the value of that
> attribute information item MUST be identical to the value of exactly one id
> attribute information item in the same envelope."
> 
> This statement does not imply where in the envelope the "id" contain element
> must be relative to the element with a "ref" attribute. But, at the end of
> the section is the following statement seems to suggest a serialization
> order:
> 
> "All nodes in the graph are encoded as described in 1 above. Additional
> inbound edges for multi reference graph nodes are encoded as described in 2
> above."
> 
> Does this mean that forward references are no longer allowed (unlike 1.1)?
> Or is my wishful thinking causing misinterpretation?  Any clarification
> would be appreciated.
> 
The order of the two sentences shouldn't be taken to imply any ordering 
wrt nodes and references to nodes. Any such restriction on serialisation 
order would have been called out explicitly; forward and backward 
references are allowed.

If you have a closed system (i.e. you control both the producer and 
consumer of messages) there's nothing to stop you from implementing a 
restricted form of the encoding that only supports backward references. 
If you do so you should use the encodingStyle attribute to mark the 
restricted encoding scheme.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Marc.

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

Received on Tuesday, 2 July 2002 06:23:56 UTC