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Fw: DFDL ICU Challenges for Implementation
by Steve Hanson 21 Aug '13

21 Aug '13

Regarding Mike's second point: Here's a link to an ICU ticket on this subject: http://bugs.icu-project.org/trac/ticket/9659 - currently targetted for ICU 52.1 Here's some more details from IBM's calls with ICU on this subject: - Exponent character / ignoreCase : Exponent char is not case sensitive. Is this intentional? * Priority : Medium ICU see two options for this: Option 1: Provide an API call to set a flag on the DecimalFormat object. Option 2: Make it a global policy settable via a config switch. This would allow other 'site policies' to be made settable using the same mechanism. There would be one set of policy flags, including this flag, per address space. There are differences in date/time processing between C and Java that could be dealt with using this mechanism. DFDL needs some of these flags to be configurable at runtime. 2012/10/19 Hit an issue where case handling was inconsistent. Fix needs care to avoid changing default behaviour and thus breaking existing users of the API. Currency and prefix/suffix may need separate switch so global switch for the DecimalFormat not appropriate. Could provide a patch to ICU for setting exponent char for now. 2013/1/17 - ICU external ticket #9659 ICU had an issue with the new API being specific to just case sensitivity of exponent (and not other regions). DFDL clarified the requirement is for an API to change global case sensitivity (not just exponent). This is targetted at ICU51 Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 ----- Forwarded by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM on 14/08/2013 16:55 ----- From: Mike Beckerle <mbeckerle.dfdl(a)gmail.com> To: "dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org" <dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org>, Date: 14/08/2013 14:14 Subject: [DFDL-WG] DFDL ICU Challenges for Implementation Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org There are a couple of features in DFDL that ICU doesn't support, yet where all or nearly all the related functionality is supported by ICU. Perhaps these aspects of the spec can be revisited? 1) List of Decimal Separators The textStandardDecimalSeparator property is a list of characters. However, ICU only supports a single character. I see lots of potential for error here, confusing diagnostics, etc. It is not consistent with textStandardGrouping separator, which allows only a single character. Is there a use case where we know we need more than one decimal separator? The only thing I can think of is a blend of say classic European-style decimal numbers like "1 234 567,89" and USA style " 1,234,567.89", but ICU won't deal with different grouping separators either. In any case if there are multiple decimal and grouping separators we really don't have these properties right in DFDL. We should require them to be specified not as two separate lists, but as a list of pairs, because grouping separators match up with specific decimal separator values in a format. 2) Case Insensitivity Some properties that we use to configure ICU are affected by ignoreCase="yes", but ICU does not support case insensitivity. The properties are: textStandardExponentRepCharacter textStandardInfinityRep textStandardNaNRep I can certainly imagine a need for case insensitivity here, and even for multiple values for these (though we allow only one for Infinity and NaN). For the infinity and nan reps that isn't so problematic as one can easily do a pre-check before calling ICU, but for the exponent rep, that is needed down in the detailed number format parsing. I can see no certain algorithm other than creating separate number format parsers for each exponent rep character in provided case, and opposite case, and then using them one by one until a successful parse. Is this ok or do we consider this a mistake? 3) We are not very consistent in these properties. We allow multiple textStandardZeroRep values, but only a single textStandardInfinityRep, and only a single textStandardNaNRep. We allow multiple textStandardExponentRepCharacter, and multiple textStandardDecimalSeparator, but only a single textStandardGroupingSeparator. This kind of inconsistency is always problematic for users. Comments? -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

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OGF DFDL WG Call Agenda 2013-08-20
by Steve Hanson 20 Aug '13

20 Aug '13

Please find agenda for call on Redmine at http://redmine.ogf.org/dmsf_files/13105?download= Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848

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OGF DFDL WG Call Agenda 2013-08-20
by Steve Hanson 19 Aug '13

19 Aug '13

Please find agenda for call on Redmine at http://redmine.ogf.org/dmsf_files/13105?download= Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848

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Fw: Direct dispatch choice clarifications
by Steve Hanson 19 Aug '13

19 Aug '13

OK, I can go with changing elementID to something less suggestive of XSDL. I've spoken with Suman and changing it is not a big deal in our model. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 ----- Forwarded by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM on 19/08/2013 14:35 ----- From: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 17/08/2013 11:51 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org I'm in general agreement with that. Just to avoid any possible confusion: I think the important thing is to stop thinking of elementID as any sort of XSD/DFDL language ID. It is not. It is a DFDL String Literal, meaning but it must describe a simple string value and it's value is matched against the return value of the choiceBranchRef expression. data. regards, Tim Kimber, DFDL Team, Hursley, UK Internet: kimbert(a)uk.ibm.com Tel. 01962-816742 Internal tel. 37246742 From: Mike Beckerle <mbeckerle.dfdl(a)gmail.com> To: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Cc: "dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org" <dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org>, "dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org" <dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org>, Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB Date: 16/08/2013 18:54 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications I am ok with leaving the name elementID as is purely due to our schedule. However, I really do think it would be good to change it now. I think it is that name which is creating all the confusion, and we really ought to be more careful. I think the important thing is to stop thinking of elementID as any sort of XSD/DFDL language ID. It is not. It is a DFDL String Literal, meaning it's value is matched against data. For example: It could be dfdl:elementID="%NUL;%NUL;%NUL;%NUL;" meaning 4 null chars. So that when the choiceBranchRef="{ ../hdr/tag }" evaluates to a 4 character string, then if they are all nul the branch is taken by direct dispatch. This character NUL isn't allowed in any namespaced identifiers in XSD or DFDL. It isn't even allowed in XML. If I had dfdl:termnator="%NUL;" you wouldn't ask "what namespace is that %NUL; in?" So I think elementID is not, in anyway, a namespace-qualified identifier any more than a delimiter is. So I think uniqueness of the elementID within the alternatives of a choice should be the only requirement. This stuff about unique within a namespace if on a global element should be dropped. The other argument for changing the name from elementID to something more choice-dispatch specific is that this workgroup seems to be speculating about using elementID for some sort of future wildcard-oriented feature. I think we should reserve names we want for that future by NOT using them now. If we use them now, we lock down part of the semantics in a way which may just not work properly with some future addition to DFDL. Do we really want elementID which is about direct dispatch choices but is not an identifier, and then in the future have dfdl:wildcardElementID which is about wildcards and IS an identifier. That's a mess. If you think elementID is a really good name for some future wildcard feature, then you should be advocating to NOT use it now for direct dispatch choices. That is, unless you have a complete design in mind for the wildcard stuff and are confident that elementID can be overloaded in a backward compatible way. I've seen nothing like this articulated. ...mike On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Steve Hanson <smh(a)uk.ibm.com> wrote: IBM has started to implement choiceBranchRef, in so far as the XML schemas for DFDL have been updated to include elementID and we have regenerated all our model code. I'd like to stick with elementID please. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Mike Beckerle <mbeckerle.dfdl(a)gmail.com> To: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Cc: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB, "dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org" <dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org>, " dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org" <dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org> Date: 16/08/2013 17:09 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications I think we need to stay out of identifiers and namespaces and qnames for this feature. The elementID should have to be locally unique within the alternatives of the choice that is dispatching to it. If that elementID lives on a global element declaration, that means nothing at all alone. In the context of a choice that has an element ref to that global element, then it has to be unique within the arms of that choice. This means it is possible to have two global element decls which have elementID="X", and there is no conflict unless they are both used via element refs from the same choice. I think this handles every use case I know of. The "namespace" requirement for elementID is only "unique within alternatives of a choice". Since nobody has implemented this feature yet, I would posit that we should change elementID to something less suggestive of an XSD identifier/QName-ish thing. Such as choiceDispatchTag. ...mike On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 5:18 AM, Steve Hanson <smh(a)uk.ibm.com> wrote: You are right about the xs:QName constructor, it takes a string which is prefix plus name. If we supplied a dfdl:QName constructor that took a URI and a name, that would simplify things. For example, the choiceBranchRef expression for SWIFT would be as below. (The element name is always Document and the namespace is used to distinguish the different messages). {dfdl:QName(fn:concat(fn:concat('urn:swift:xsd:fin.', /FinMessage/Block2/MessageType), ".2011"), 'Document')} If we stick with elementID for DFDL 1.0, then I agree with your 3 bullets, but not the defaulting to element name as it is setting a behaviour that may not be where we want to go for 2.0. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 15/08/2013 20:34 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org The other problem with using a QName is that it involves using namespace prefixes. That means that there needs to be a mapping between prefixes and namespace URIs. I can see that getting very problematic if the choice group is located in a different xsd from the global elements that it references. I think we should - keep the elementID as a simple string - insist that all branches of a choice have different elementIDs - remove the global uniqueness constraint, for the reasons explained in this email chain I think it would be easier for modellers if the elementID defaulted to the local name of the element. I understand that name clashes can, in principle, occur. If users want to avoid that then they can be explicit about elementIDs and they could even define a naming convention for their elementIDs to make them look very much like QNames. Sounds like a lot of work, but DFDL models that are complex enough to need that approach will often be code-genned anyway. regards, Tim Kimber, DFDL Team, Hursley, UK Internet: kimbert(a)uk.ibm.com Tel. 01962-816742 Internal tel. 37246742 From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 15/08/2013 18:37 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org The more I think it through, the more I see the use of a string elementID (or local element name) causing problems when/if we extend to support xs:any in the future. In my original proposal for direct dispatch choice I proposed that choiceBranchRef returned a QName which therefore automatically selected the element, and coped with any namespace issues. The problem with QName though is that the expression to build it can become a big case statement negating some of the performance gain, if there is no automap way of getting from the 'tag' to the QName. Hence why we introduced elementID. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM To: Suman Kalia <kalia(a)ca.ibm.com>, Cc: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org, Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB Date: 15/08/2013 17:20 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Suman, comments to yours in pink Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Suman Kalia <kalia(a)ca.ibm.com> To: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Cc: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Date: 15/08/2013 15:31 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org comments in green Suman Kalia IBM Canada Lab WMB Toolkit Architect and Development Lead Tel: 905-413-3923 T/L 313-3923 Email: kalia(a)ca.ibm.com For info on Message broker http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmb.h… From: Tim Kimber <KIMBERT(a)uk.ibm.com> To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 08/15/2013 09:58 AM Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org See comment in <TK> tags. regards, Tim Kimber, DFDL Team, Hursley, UK Internet: kimbert(a)uk.ibm.com Tel. 01962-816742 Internal tel. 37246742 From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 15/08/2013 12:57 Subject: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Looking at this in more detail prior to writing up behaviour for section 9, there are a couple of things missing from the spec or that need clarification: 1) Description of elementID property should say that empty string is not allowed (this was in the erratum). 2) Should say that an elementID on an elementRef overrides any elementID on the global element (this was in the erratum). 3) Section 15.1.2 says that is a schema definition error if the elementId values of global elements are not unique within a given namespace. I don't see where namespace comes into this, the elementID is just a string so surely it needs to be unique across namespaces? (Strictly elementID needs only to be unique across the global elements involved in each specific choice, but it was minuted that global uniqueness was desirable to allow future xs:any support). <TK> In XML Schema, an xs:any does not, in general, match all global elements. The 'namespace' attribute can narrow the set to elements from a specified list of namespaces. There is no way in XML Schema 1.0 to further narrow the xs:any, So the rule is designed to ensure that future usage of xs:any when a single namespace is specified and processContents!='skip' does not throw up schema definition errors. However...I note that XML Schema 1.1 allows a new way to narrow the scope of an xs:any ( by specifying a list of not-included QNames ). My feeling is that the unique-within-namespace check is fragile. </TK> <SK> As per my recollection, we put the uniqueness rules across namespaces to accommodate chameleon namespaces. Consider a global element E1 in notarget namespace having elementID E1_ID and is included in 2 schemas with different target namespaces say TNS1 and TNS2.. Consider a choice containing element references TNS1:E1 and TNS2:E1, in order to disambiguate these elements in the context choice, the element ID has to be unique in the context of namespace. This is somewhat an edge case but can come more prevalent when the support for xs:any is provided. </SK> SMH: In the choice, the element refs to TNS1:E1 and TNS2:E1 both have an elementID string 'E1_ID' from the original E1 global element. In the choice, this is an error because the elementID is not unique in the choice (we match the result of the choiceBranchRef expression, which returns a string not a QName). The only way round this is to override the elementID on one of the element refs (see 2 above) and set a value that is unique. That then works. But that does not help the (future) xs:any scenario, where there is no element ref to carry the override. I think the chameleon namespace scenario will always cause a problem with xs:any because our elementIDs are strings not QNames. I think we should leave a global element uniqueness check out of DFDL 1.0. It doesn't actually future proof anything, as once I use xs:any the whole nature of the xsd changes. 4) Spec does not explicitly say that when choiceBranchRef is present each branch of the choice must have an elementID. This must be the case, as otherwise a choice branch will never be accessible. 5) Tim has suggested that if an element was silent about elementID, the local name of the element could be used instead. So conceptually an element would have an 'effective elementID'. This makes modelling easier if the 'tag' in the data is the same as the element name. <TK>...or if the element name is derivable from the 'tag' using a simple XPath expression</TK> SMH: True. The validation checks would need to ensure that the set of 'effective elementIDs' was unique; for the global element check as currently specified (see 3) this would mean that all global elements must have unique local names, unless an elementID is carried - I think this is too limiting. SMH: While defaulting to the local name sounds attractive, I can't convince myself that it won't cause problems if we add xs:any in DFDL 2.0 and multiple/chameleon namespaces are involved. SMH: Conclusion: For DFDL 1.0 we take the conservative position and say that you must specify an elementID on an element that is used in a choice with choiceBranchRef and it must be unique in the context of the choice only. No global uniqueness check is made. >From minutes of 17th April 2012. 145 Provide a 'dispatch' way of discriminating a choice for better performance of the envelope/payload use case (Steve, Mike, Suman) 12/7: See minutes. Need to choose a proposal and flesh out. 19/07: Waiting for proposals 26/07: Waiting for proposals 16/08: Waiting for proposals. Suman added to action. ... 1/11: Steve to send a proposal ... 21/03: Steve has sent a proposal. Mike has sent a counter proposal. Steve to respond. 28/03: Steve has sent a revised proposal. Review for discussion next week. Ensure proposal handles Mike's scenario where tag value to branch mapping is not 1-1. 05/04: Discussed Mike's review comments and Suman's concerns. Agreed that name should be elementID, should be a single DFDL String Literal value, and that matching of choiceBranchRef expression result should only be against elementID to avoid QName v String confusion. Steve to recirculate with a schema example. 17/04: Closed. Discussion on whether the choiceBranchRef expression should retiurn xs:string or something else. Agreed on xs:string. Discussed whether elemenID should be a pure xs:string or a DFDL String Literal. For consistency with other DFDL properties it should be a string literal, but raw byte entities and character classes should be disallowed to avoid complications. Discussed scope of uniqueness of elementIDs. Agreed that uniqueness is both local to a choice, and across all global elements in the same namespace (the latter is not strictly needed right now but accommodates any future addition of xs:any). Agreed that elementID should be on global element, local element, and element ref (in which case it overrides any elementId on the global element, which is ok as the property does not follow the usual scoping rules). Errata taken. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg -- Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Tresys Technology | www.tresys.com Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Tresys Technology | www.tresys.com Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

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Spec bug: WSP* should not be allowed for textStandardZeroRep
by Mike Beckerle 19 Aug '13

19 Aug '13

We don't allow %ES; for textStandardZeroRep. But we do allow character class entities like %NL; %WSP; %WSP+; and... problematic: %WSP*; I claim if you don't allow %ES; you should not allow %WSP*; because it matches zero-or-more, allowing an empty-string to match in principle. Leaving off WSP* only eliminates the zero-characters option, as WSP+ is available. There are probably other places in the spec that have this same issue. Basically, anyplace that %ES is disallowed but the other character class entities are allowed. -- Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair | Tresys Technology | www.tresys.com

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Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications
by Steve Hanson 17 Aug '13

17 Aug '13

The more I think it through, the more I see the use of a string elementID (or local element name) causing problems when/if we extend to support xs:any in the future. In my original proposal for direct dispatch choice I proposed that choiceBranchRef returned a QName which therefore automatically selected the element, and coped with any namespace issues. The problem with QName though is that the expression to build it can become a big case statement negating some of the performance gain, if there is no automap way of getting from the 'tag' to the QName. Hence why we introduced elementID. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM To: Suman Kalia <kalia(a)ca.ibm.com>, Cc: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org, Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB Date: 15/08/2013 17:20 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Suman, comments to yours in pink Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Suman Kalia <kalia(a)ca.ibm.com> To: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Cc: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Date: 15/08/2013 15:31 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org comments in green Suman Kalia IBM Canada Lab WMB Toolkit Architect and Development Lead Tel: 905-413-3923 T/L 313-3923 Email: kalia(a)ca.ibm.com For info on Message broker http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmb.h… From: Tim Kimber <KIMBERT(a)uk.ibm.com> To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 08/15/2013 09:58 AM Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org See comment in <TK> tags. regards, Tim Kimber, DFDL Team, Hursley, UK Internet: kimbert(a)uk.ibm.com Tel. 01962-816742 Internal tel. 37246742 From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 15/08/2013 12:57 Subject: [DFDL-WG] Direct dispatch choice clarifications Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Looking at this in more detail prior to writing up behaviour for section 9, there are a couple of things missing from the spec or that need clarification: 1) Description of elementID property should say that empty string is not allowed (this was in the erratum). 2) Should say that an elementID on an elementRef overrides any elementID on the global element (this was in the erratum). 3) Section 15.1.2 says that is a schema definition error if the elementId values of global elements are not unique within a given namespace. I don't see where namespace comes into this, the elementID is just a string so surely it needs to be unique across namespaces? (Strictly elementID needs only to be unique across the global elements involved in each specific choice, but it was minuted that global uniqueness was desirable to allow future xs:any support). <TK> In XML Schema, an xs:any does not, in general, match all global elements. The 'namespace' attribute can narrow the set to elements from a specified list of namespaces. There is no way in XML Schema 1.0 to further narrow the xs:any, So the rule is designed to ensure that future usage of xs:any when a single namespace is specified and processContents!='skip' does not throw up schema definition errors. However...I note that XML Schema 1.1 allows a new way to narrow the scope of an xs:any ( by specifying a list of not-included QNames ). My feeling is that the unique-within-namespace check is fragile. </TK> <SK> As per my recollection, we put the uniqueness rules across namespaces to accommodate chameleon namespaces. Consider a global element E1 in notarget namespace having elementID E1_ID and is included in 2 schemas with different target namespaces say TNS1 and TNS2.. Consider a choice containing element references TNS1:E1 and TNS2:E1, in order to disambiguate these elements in the context choice, the element ID has to be unique in the context of namespace. This is somewhat an edge case but can come more prevalent when the support for xs:any is provided. </SK> SMH: In the choice, the element refs to TNS1:E1 and TNS2:E1 both have an elementID string 'E1_ID' from the original E1 global element. In the choice, this is an error because the elementID is not unique in the choice (we match the result of the choiceBranchRef expression, which returns a string not a QName). The only way round this is to override the elementID on one of the element refs (see 2 above) and set a value that is unique. That then works. But that does not help the (future) xs:any scenario, where there is no element ref to carry the override. I think the chameleon namespace scenario will always cause a problem with xs:any because our elementIDs are strings not QNames. I think we should leave a global element uniqueness check out of DFDL 1.0. It doesn't actually future proof anything, as once I use xs:any the whole nature of the xsd changes. 4) Spec does not explicitly say that when choiceBranchRef is present each branch of the choice must have an elementID. This must be the case, as otherwise a choice branch will never be accessible. 5) Tim has suggested that if an element was silent about elementID, the local name of the element could be used instead. So conceptually an element would have an 'effective elementID'. This makes modelling easier if the 'tag' in the data is the same as the element name. <TK>...or if the element name is derivable from the 'tag' using a simple XPath expression</TK> SMH: True. The validation checks would need to ensure that the set of 'effective elementIDs' was unique; for the global element check as currently specified (see 3) this would mean that all global elements must have unique local names, unless an elementID is carried - I think this is too limiting. SMH: While defaulting to the local name sounds attractive, I can't convince myself that it won't cause problems if we add xs:any in DFDL 2.0 and multiple/chameleon namespaces are involved. SMH: Conclusion: For DFDL 1.0 we take the conservative position and say that you must specify an elementID on an element that is used in a choice with choiceBranchRef and it must be unique in the context of the choice only. No global uniqueness check is made. >From minutes of 17th April 2012. 145 Provide a 'dispatch' way of discriminating a choice for better performance of the envelope/payload use case (Steve, Mike, Suman) 12/7: See minutes. Need to choose a proposal and flesh out. 19/07: Waiting for proposals 26/07: Waiting for proposals 16/08: Waiting for proposals. Suman added to action. ... 1/11: Steve to send a proposal ... 21/03: Steve has sent a proposal. Mike has sent a counter proposal. Steve to respond. 28/03: Steve has sent a revised proposal. Review for discussion next week. Ensure proposal handles Mike's scenario where tag value to branch mapping is not 1-1. 05/04: Discussed Mike's review comments and Suman's concerns. Agreed that name should be elementID, should be a single DFDL String Literal value, and that matching of choiceBranchRef expression result should only be against elementID to avoid QName v String confusion. Steve to recirculate with a schema example. 17/04: Closed. Discussion on whether the choiceBranchRef expression should retiurn xs:string or something else. Agreed on xs:string. Discussed whether elemenID should be a pure xs:string or a DFDL String Literal. For consistency with other DFDL properties it should be a string literal, but raw byte entities and character classes should be disallowed to avoid complications. Discussed scope of uniqueness of elementIDs. Agreed that uniqueness is both local to a choice, and across all global elements in the same namespace (the latter is not strictly needed right now but accommodates any future addition of xs:any). Agreed that elementID should be on global element, local element, and element ref (in which case it overrides any elementId on the global element, which is ok as the property does not follow the usual scoping rules). Errata taken. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

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Fw: Extra restrictions needed for dfdl:floating 'yes' ?
by Steve Hanson 16 Aug '13

16 Aug '13

Agreed with the extra restrictions #1 and #2 and the additional/changed words in answer to Q2. Errata will be added. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 ----- Forwarded by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM on 14/08/2013 17:20 ----- From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM To: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Cc: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Date: 14/08/2013 13:17 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Extra restrictions needed for dfdl:floating 'yes' ? Q1: This is already disallowed. Q2: I think the way to look at this is that a non-floating array element must have its occurrences appearing contiguously, so the floating element can't appear in-between. In other words, floating 'yes' only makes a statement about the floating element, not about any other elements in the sequence. If we agree, then that needs clarifying in 14.4, and the statement I quoted needs modifying. "An ordered sequence of n element children all with either n or n-1 of those children with dfdl:floating='yes' is equivalent to an unordered sequence with the same n element children with dfdl:floating='no'." Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 From: Tim Kimber/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 14/08/2013 12:45 Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Extra restrictions needed for dfdl:floating 'yes' ? Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Good question.Here are a couple more to consider, along the same lines: Q1: Suppose that the group looks like this: <xs:sequence dfdl:sequenceKind="ordered"> <xs:element name="floating1" dfdl:floating="yes" type="xs:string"/> <xs:group ref="someGlobalModelGroup"> <xs:element name="floating2" dfdl:floating="yes" type="xs:string"/> <xs:sequence> This is effectively an unordered group ( all except one member has floating='yes') but it contains a sequence group. Do we need to prohibit this? Q2: Suppose that the group looks like this: <xs:sequence dfdl:sequenceKind="ordered"> <xs:element name="floating1" dfdl:floating="yes" type="xs:string"/> <xs:element name="nonFloating" dfdl:floating="no" type="xs:string" minOccurs="5" maxOccurs="5" dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit"/> <xs:element name="floating2" dfdl:floating="yes" type="xs:string"/> <xs:sequence> Here, the 5 occurrences of nonFloating could be scattered all over the group's content, with floating elements in between. Is that something that we want to allow? It seems inconsistent with the decision to re: occursCountKind and sequenceKind='unordered'. regards, Tim Kimber, DFDL Team, Hursley, UK Internet: kimbert(a)uk.ibm.com Tel. 01962-816742 Internal tel. 37246742 From: Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB To: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, Date: 14/08/2013 12:15 Subject: [DFDL-WG] Extra restrictions needed for dfdl:floating 'yes' ? Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Section 14.4 of the spec says: "An ordered sequence of n element children with either n or n-1 of those children with dfdl:floating='yes' is equivalent to an unordered sequence with the same n element children with dfdl:floating='no'." Does this mean that the extra restrictions we recently added for unordered sequences must also apply to floating elements? If so these would manifest themselves as: #1: It is a schema definition error if an element with dfdl:floating 'yes' is an optional element or an array element and its dfdl:occursCountKind property is not ‘parsed’. #2: It is a schema definition error if two or more elements with dfdl:floating 'yes' in the same group have the same name and the same namespace. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org https://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

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Action 204: Establish strict versus lax behaviour for ICU calendar patterns
by Steve Hanson 16 Aug '13

16 Aug '13

For the subset of ICU symbols that DFDL supports, here is what ICU claim: 1) Lenient parsing behaviour when in 'strict' mode: a) case insensitive matching for text fields b) MMM, MMMM, MMMMM all accept either short or long form of Month c) E, EE, EEE, EEEE, EEEEE **, EEEEEE *** all accept either abbreviated, full, narrow and short forms of Day of Week d) accept truncated leftmost numeric field (eg, pattern "HHmmss" allows "123456" (12:34:56) and "23456" (2:34:56) but not "3456") 2) Additional lenient parsing behaviour when in 'lax' mode: a) values outside valid ranges are normalized (eg, "March 32 1996" is treated as "April 1 1996") b) ignoring a trailing dot after a non-numeric field c) leading and trailing whitespace in the data but not in the pattern is accepted **** d) whitespace in the pattern can be missing in the data e) partial matching on literal strings (eg, data "20130621d" allowed for pattern "yyyyMMdd'date' " **** ** Bug found when testing this - EEEEE 'narrow' form completely broken - ICU ticket raised. *** EEEEEE and eeeeee are new and support a 2 char version of 'short' form - eg Tu or Mo. Not currently allowed by DFDL, we should consider allowing it. **** Only currently in ICU4C. ICU4J will be changed to match ICU4C. Note: IBM is in discussion with ICU to provide a 'really strict' mode (name tbd) which has no leniency at all. We need to decide whether to reflect all three variants in the dfdl:calendarCheckPolicy, or whether to remap our 'strict' to the new 'really strict' mode when it appears. Given where we are I think is a DFDL 2.0 item. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

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Direct dispatch choice clarifications
by Steve Hanson 15 Aug '13

15 Aug '13

Looking at this in more detail prior to writing up behaviour for section 9, there are a couple of things missing from the spec or that need clarification: 1) Description of elementID property should say that empty string is not allowed (this was in the erratum). 2) Should say that an elementID on an elementRef overrides any elementID on the global element (this was in the erratum). 3) Section 15.1.2 says that is a schema definition error if the elementId values of global elements are not unique within a given namespace. I don't see where namespace comes into this, the elementID is just a string so surely it needs to be unique across namespaces? (Strictly elementID needs only to be unique across the global elements involved in each specific choice, but it was minuted that global uniqueness was desirable to allow future xs:any support). 4) Spec does not explicitly say that when choiceBranchRef is present each branch of the choice must have an elementID. This must be the case, as otherwise a choice branch will never be accessible. 5) Tim has suggested that if an element was silent about elementID, the local name of the element could be used instead. So conceptually an element would have an 'effective elementID'. This makes modelling easier if the 'tag' in the data is the same as the element name. The validation checks would need to ensure that the set of 'effective elementIDs' was unique; for the global element check as currently specified (see 3) this would mean that all global elements must have unique local names, unless an elementID is carried - I think this is too limiting. >From minutes of 17th April 2012. 145 Provide a 'dispatch' way of discriminating a choice for better performance of the envelope/payload use case (Steve, Mike, Suman) 12/7: See minutes. Need to choose a proposal and flesh out. 19/07: Waiting for proposals 26/07: Waiting for proposals 16/08: Waiting for proposals. Suman added to action. ... 1/11: Steve to send a proposal ... 21/03: Steve has sent a proposal. Mike has sent a counter proposal. Steve to respond. 28/03: Steve has sent a revised proposal. Review for discussion next week. Ensure proposal handles Mike's scenario where tag value to branch mapping is not 1-1. 05/04: Discussed Mike's review comments and Suman's concerns. Agreed that name should be elementID, should be a single DFDL String Literal value, and that matching of choiceBranchRef expression result should only be against elementID to avoid QName v String confusion. Steve to recirculate with a schema example. 17/04: Closed. Discussion on whether the choiceBranchRef expression should retiurn xs:string or something else. Agreed on xs:string. Discussed whether elemenID should be a pure xs:string or a DFDL String Literal. For consistency with other DFDL properties it should be a string literal, but raw byte entities and character classes should be disallowed to avoid complications. Discussed scope of uniqueness of elementIDs. Agreed that uniqueness is both local to a choice, and across all global elements in the same namespace (the latter is not strictly needed right now but accommodates any future addition of xs:any). Agreed that elementID should be on global element, local element, and element ref (in which case it overrides any elementId on the global element, which is ok as the property does not follow the usual scoping rules). Errata taken. Regards Steve Hanson Architect, IBM Data Format Description Language (DFDL) Co-Chair, OGF DFDL Working Group IBM SWG, Hursley, UK smh(a)uk.ibm.com tel:+44-1962-815848 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU

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DFDL ICU Challenges for Implementation
by Mike Beckerle 14 Aug '13

14 Aug '13

There are a couple of features in DFDL that ICU doesn't support, yet where all or nearly all the related functionality is supported by ICU. Perhaps these aspects of the spec can be revisited? 1) List of Decimal Separators The textStandardDecimalSeparator property is a list of characters. However, ICU only supports a single character. I see lots of potential for error here, confusing diagnostics, etc. It is not consistent with textStandardGrouping separator, which allows only a single character. Is there a use case where we know we need more than one decimal separator? The only thing I can think of is a blend of say classic European-style decimal numbers like "1 234 567,89" and USA style " 1,234,567.89", but ICU won't deal with different grouping separators either. In any case if there are multiple decimal and grouping separators we really don't have these properties right in DFDL. We should require them to be specified not as two separate lists, but as a list of pairs, because grouping separators match up with specific decimal separator values in a format. 2) Case Insensitivity Some properties that we use to configure ICU are affected by ignoreCase="yes", but ICU does not support case insensitivity. The properties are: textStandardExponentRepCharacter textStandardInfinityRep textStandardNaNRep I can certainly imagine a need for case insensitivity here, and even for multiple values for these (though we allow only one for Infinity and NaN). For the infinity and nan reps that isn't so problematic as one can easily do a pre-check before calling ICU, but for the exponent rep, that is needed down in the detailed number format parsing. I can see no certain algorithm other than creating separate number format parsers for each exponent rep character in provided case, and opposite case, and then using them one by one until a successful parse. Is this ok or do we consider this a mistake? 3) We are not very consistent in these properties. We allow multiple textStandardZeroRep values, but only a single textStandardInfinityRep, and only a single textStandardNaNRep. We allow multiple textStandardExponentRepCharacter, and multiple textStandardDecimalSeparator, but only a single textStandardGroupingSeparator. This kind of inconsistency is always problematic for users. Comments?

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