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Invitation: OGF DFDL Working Group extra call (23 Jun 14:00 GDT)
by Alan Powell 22 Jun '09

22 Jun '09

Participant Passcode: 8190865 Country Toll Numbers Freephone/Toll Free Number AUSTRIA 43-1-928-9652 BELGIUM 32-2-400-6791 0800-4-9612 DENMARK 45-7014-0237 FRANCE LYON: 33-4-26-69-12-74 080-511-3725 FRANCE MARSEILLE: 33-4-86-06-00-74 080-511-3725 FRANCE PARIS: 33-1-70-70-81-58 080-511-3725 GERMANY 49-69-2222-20363 0800-100-6504 IRELAND 353-1-247-7768 ITALY 39-02-3600-3648 800-985-679 LUXEMBOURG 352-27-000-1312 NETHERLANDS 31-20-713-2741 0800-020-3237 SPAIN 34-91-414-1542 800-099-667 SWEDEN 46-8-566-10-780 SWITZERLAND 41-44-580-3334 0800-000-516 UNITED KINGDOM BIRMINGHAM: 44-121-210-9014 0800-279-9193 UNITED KINGDOM GLASGOW: 44-141-202-3214 0800-279-9193 UNITED KINGDOM LEEDS: 44-113-301-2114 0800-279-9193 UNITED KINGDOM LONDON: 44-20-7019-0808 0800-279-9193 UNITED KINGDOM MANCHESTER: 44-161-601-1414 0800-279-9193 USA 866-505-4412

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Minutes for OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 16-17 2009
by Alan Powell 18 Jun '09

18 Jun '09

Open Grid Forum: Data Format Description Language Working Group OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 16-17 2009 These minutes cover the series of meetings and calls which took place June 16-17 2009 Meeting opened, 14:00 UK Attendees Steve Hanson (IBM) Mike Beckerle (Oco) Suman Kalia (IBM) Alan Powell (IBM) Peter Lambros (IBM) Apologies Agenda: Actions updated below Action 028 Variable Markup/ Recursive use of DFDL As decided on last calls recursive use of DFDL will not be supported in DFDL v1 The uses cases are satisfied as follows: a) Case insensitivity of data (eg, true & TRUE for text boolean) A new property that indicates the case sensitivity of representation data values. Note: this property will not effect calendar values, such as Monday, which will always be case insensitive. b) Case insensitivity of markup (eg, hdr & HDR for initiator) A new property that indicates the case sensitivity of all markup on a component. c) Different possible values for non-white space markup (eg, @ and # for separator) Markup properties will allow a list of values d) Different possible values for data (eg, true & yes for text boolean) Value properties will allow a list of values e) Encoding of markup different to encoding of data (eg, initiator and terminator different to data) The markup properties must be put on a wrapping xs:sequence and controlled by the xs:sequence's encoding property. Action 042 Variables. The uses cases for variables are Extracting syntax data fields As an indicator to identify Payload As an easier way to set bits in bitmap As the way dfdl properties can be set from outside the parser. And the following aspects need to be defined Scoping of defineVariable naming/namespaces - include/import Unparsing Variable Type - enums Multiple setVariables in loops etc SKK documented his proposal to define the scope of variables by defining them in a defineFormat annotation. Variables are in scope when the defineFormat is referenced in addition to existing scoping rules. While it seems attractive to group variable definitions there was concern that it is changing the semantics of defineFormat and making it incompatible with the other definexxx annotations. SKK to refine proposal. Other aspects of variable still to be resolved. Action 051 Implement concerns with current scoping rules. MB proposed a new syntax for defining parameters that identified which properties can be overridden. Concern at the complexity. SH proposed using existing variables. Discussion on how overriding should work with simple types. Options : 1. Existing rules. Simple types must be completely valid 2. Disallow dfdl annotations on simple types. 3. Only allow 'value representation' properties which must be completely valid. Next call 23 and 24th June 14:00 UK Scheduled for 2 hours Meeting closed, 16:00 UK Actions raised at this meeting No Action Current Actions: No Action 012 AP/SH: Update decimalCalendarScheme 10/9: Not allocated yet 17/9: No update 24/9: Add calendar binary formats to actions 22/10: No progress 16/1: proposal distributed and discussed. Will be redistributed 21/1: add locale, 04/02: changed from locale to specific properties 18/2: Need more investigation of ICU strict/lax behaviour. 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: AP to complete asap once the ICU strict/lax behaviour is understood. 29/04: No progress 06/05: No progress 13/05: Calendar has been added to latest spec version v034 but still a few details to clarify. 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress (low priority) 09/06: No Progress (low priority) 17/06: SH to check ICU code for lax calendar behaviour 026 SH: Envelopes and Payloads 08/04: Not discussed explicity, but recursive use of DFDL is tied up with this 22/04: Two aspects. Firstly compositional - do sufficient mechanisms exist to model an envelope with a payload that varies. Secondly markup syntax - this might be defined in the envelope. The second of these is very much tied up with the variable markup action 028, so will be considered there. SH to verify the composition aspect. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. related to Action 028 06/05: No progress 06/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Still a number of aspects to be decided. - Compostion - Does the envelope and payload need to be defined in the same schema or should they be dynamically bound at runtime? - Compostion- How is a variable payload specified. Choice or xs:any; New action raised to discuss xs:any - extracting dymanic syntax from data. Covered by action 029 valuecalc. 03/06: Dynamic runtime binding will not be supported. SH investigating use of variables to enable standalone and use in envelope of global element. 09/06: Payload should be specified using a choice rather than xs:any 17/06: SH still working on example using variables 027 SH: Property precedence tables 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Two things missing from the existing precedence trees. Firstly, does not show alternates (eg, initiator v initiatorkind). Secondly, need a tree per concrete DFDL object (eg, element). SH to update. 29/04: No progress 06/05: SH is updating tables which will be ready for next call 13/05: SH emailed updated version. AP commented.. See minutes for issues and property changes. 20/05: Updated version circulated. Review before next call and be ready for vote. 27/05: Updated version circulated. more comments raised. 03/06: Further updates to clarify 'core'. Also identified missing design for outputMinLength 17/06: Being updated to include outputMinlength 028 SH: Variable markup 08/04: Discussed briefly at end of call, IBM to see whether there any use cases that require recursive use of DFDL. 15/04: Use case was distributed and will be discussed on next call. 22/04: The use case in question is EDI where the terminating markup for the payload segments is defined in the ISA envelope segment. The markup is modelled as an element of simple type where the allowable markup values are defined as enums on the type. But we need to handle two cases - firstly where the envelope is present, so the value used by the payload is taken from the envelope. Secondly where only the payload is present. Here we need a way of scanning for all the enum values, and adopting the one we actually find, when parsing. And using a default when unparsing. SH to explore use of a DFDL variable, where the variable has a default, but also has a type that is the same as the markup element - that way we get to use the enums without defining everything twice. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. 06/05: No progress 13/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Progress made and will tie to other actions 03/06: General desire to avoid having to introduce variable markup in V1. Proposed having a property to control case behaviour of all syntax (initiator, terminator,separator) rather than separate ones for each. Similar property to 'values' (textZeroRep, textBooleanTrueRep, etc). and allowing lists of values. SH need to solve remaining uses case as described in action 026 09/06: SH proposal discussed. ICU questions to be researched 17/06: ICU is always case insensitive. SH to update proposal. 029 MB: valueCalc (output length calculation) 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Action allocated to MB, this is to complete the work started at the Hursley WG F2F meeting. 29/04: No progress 06/05: MB will have update for next call 13/05: MB will have update for next call 20/05: Some progress. will be circulated this week 27/05: MB circulated proposal and got comments. Will update and review on next call 03/06: Discussed proposal. MB to update dealing with uses cases raised. Options include a new lenghtKind='Reference' to make it easier to distinguish from fixed length case. Or use outputLengthCalc to separate calculation of parsing and unparsing length. 09/06: SH/AP proposal discussed and MB to document 17/06: MB to document proposal. Grammar updated and reviewed. Minor changes needed. 033 AP/TK: Assert/Discriminator semantics. AP to document. TK to check uses of discriminator besides choice. 08/04: In progress within IBM 22/04: Waiting for TK to return from leave to complete. 29/04: TK has sent examples shown need for discriminators beyond choice. Agreed. MB to respond to TK 06/05: Discussed suggestion of adding type indicator to discriminator. MB to provide examples. 15/03: Semantic documented in v034. MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator 20/05: MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator (but lower priority than action 029) 27/05: No Progress (lower priority) 03/06: No Progress (lower priority) 09/06: No Progress (lower priority) 037 All: Approach for XML Schema 1.0 UPA checks. 22/04: Several non-XML models, when expressed in their most obvious DFDL Schema form, would fail XML Schema 1.0 Unique Particle Attribution checks that police model ambiguity. And even re-jigging the model sometimes fails to fix this. Note this is equally applicable to XMl Schema 1.1 and 1.0. While the DFDL parser/unparser can happily resolve the ambiguities, the issue is one of definition. If an XSD editor that implements UPA checks is used to create DFDL Schema, then errors will be flagged. DFDL may have to adopt the position that: a)DFDL parser/unparser will not implement some/all UPA checks (exact checks tbd) b) XML Schema editors that implement UPA checks will not be suitable for all DFDL models c) If DFDL annotations are removed, the resulting pure XSD will not always be valid (ie, the equivalent XML is ambiguous and can't be modelled by XML Schema 1.0) Ongoing in case another solution can be found. 29/04: Will ask DG and S Gao for opinion before closing 06/05: Discussed S Gao email and suggestions. Decided need to review all XML UPA rules and decide which apply to dfdl. 20/05: SH or SKK to investigate 27/05: No Progress 03/06: The concern is that some dfdl schemas will fail UPA check when validation is turned on or when editted using tooling that enforces UPA checks. Renaming fields will resolve some/most issues. Need documentation that describes issue and best practice. 17/06: no change 038 MB: Submit response to OMG RFI for non-XML standardization 22/04: First step is for MB to mail the OGF Data Area chair to say that we want to submit 29/04: MB has been in contact with OMG and will sunbit dfdl. 06/05: MB has prepared response to OMG. Will send DFDL sepc v033 20/05: Response has been sent to OMG based on v034 27/05: Awaiting response from OMG. 03/06: On hold 042 MB: Complete variable specification. To include how properties such as encoding can be set externally. Must be a known variable name. 06/05: No progress 20/05: AP to make proposal 27/05: MB proposed differentiating between input and output variables to avoid unnecessary evaluations during parse and unparse. Need to complete rest of variable specification. 03/06: Pointed out problem of declaring variables input or output when used to define syntax which is used both times. MB to update proposal to include how variables are set externally and how specific properties such as encoding are set. 09/06: SKK to use example to dicument his proposal 17/06: SKK to refine proposal. Other aspects need progress. 044 13/05: Bidi 20/05: AP: will check what IBM products support. 27/05: Bidi is supported so will be needed in dfdl v1 03/06: No Progress 09/06: No Progress 045 20/05 AP: Speculative Parsing 27/05: Psuedo code has been circulated. Review for next call 03/06: Comments received and will be incorporated 09/06: Progress but not discussed 17/06: Discussed briefly 049 20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas 03/06: not discussed 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Proposed dropping xs:any support 17:06: Agreed to defer from DFDL v1 subject to final checks that IBM do not need function. 051 Scoping rules. MB: to document change to scoping rules to satisfy implementation concerns 17/06: MB and SH proposals discussed. Needs further discussion Closed actions: 043 13/05: Types in the infoset. Currently infoset types have defined value space but that implies a parser would have to validate input. Is this correct? 20/05: SH No progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress 09/06: SH proposed staying with XML built-in types. Closed 17/06 closed 047 20/05 AP: Scoping for non-format annotations 27/05: Discussed briefly. AP to distribute 03/06: Proposal discussed briefly. Will be updated. 09/06: Doc emailed. Awaiting outcome of variable to define/setvariable rules. 17/06: Closed. Move to work item. Will be updated when variables resolved. 048 20/05: AP investigate Restart 27/05: Suggest RESTART is not part of the scope for DFDL. 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Closed Work items: No Item target version status 003 Variables - ??, 2008 (Mike) 005 Improvements on property descriptions - ??, 2008 (All - split TBD) 006 Envelopes and Payloads (Steve) - Apr 30, 2008 007 (from draft 32) valueCalc (Mike) - ??, 2008 mostly complete 008 (from draft 32) Property precedence for writing (Steve) - under review 009 (from draft 32) Variable markup (Steve) - Mar 31, 2008 proposal needs writing up 011 (from draft 32) How speculative parsing works (combining choice and variable-occurence - currently these are separate) ??, 2008 (IBM) in progress 012 (from draft 32) Reordering the properties discussion: move representation earlier, improve flow of topics ??, 2008 (Alan) not started 027 Calendar schemes 034 032 Floating components 033 Changes from action 020 and 027 - renaming properties etc 035 Remove unorderedInitiated, add initiated content (a041) 036 Update dfdl schema with change properties (Suman) 037 Infoset text codepage 038 Improve length section 039 Change scoping of simple types (A 046) 040 Document outputMinLength (A027) 042 mapping of the dfdl infoset to XDM Not required for V1 specification 043 Document infoset data types (A043) 044 non-format scoping rules (A047) Alan Powell MP 211, IBM UK Labs, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, England Notes Id: Alan Powell/UK/IBM email: alan_powell(a)uk.ibm.com Tel: +44 (0)1962 815073 Fax: +44 (0)1962 816898 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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Agenda for OGF DFDL WG call 17 June 2009
by Alan Powell 17 Jun '09

17 Jun '09

Action 028 Variable Markup Does ICU ignore case? Action 029 valueCalc MB to update grammar diagrams to add padding fields. Action 042 Scoping for non-format annotations close? Action 050 xs:any Support Drop xs:any :support? leading/trailing skip bytes (MRM comment in spec) Bit Fields/ LengthUnit='bits' ACTION 051 Implement concerns with current scoping rules Review Rest of Actions Current Actions: No Action 012 AP/SH: Update decimalCalendarScheme 10/9: Not allocated yet 17/9: No update 24/9: Add calendar binary formats to actions 22/10: No progress 16/1: proposal distributed and discussed. Will be redistributed 21/1: add locale, 04/02: changed from locale to specific properties 18/2: Need more investigation of ICU strict/lax behaviour. 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: AP to complete asap once the ICU strict/lax behaviour is understood. 29/04: No progress 06/05: No progress 13/05: Calendar has been added to latest spec version v034 but still a few details to clarify. 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress (low priority) 09/06: No Progress (low priority) 026 SH: Envelopes and Payloads 08/04: Not discussed explicity, but recursive use of DFDL is tied up with this 22/04: Two aspects. Firstly compositional - do sufficient mechanisms exist to model an envelope with a payload that varies. Secondly markup syntax - this might be defined in the envelope. The second of these is very much tied up with the variable markup action 028, so will be considered there. SH to verify the composition aspect. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. related to Action 028 06/05: No progress 06/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Still a number of aspects to be decided. - Compostion - Does the envelope and payload need to be defined in the same schema or should they be dynamically bound at runtime? - Compostion- How is a variable payload specified. Choice or xs:any; New action raised to discuss xs:any - extracting dymanic syntax from data. Covered by action 029 valuecalc. 03/06: Dynamic runtime binding will not be supported. SH investigating use of variables to enable standalone and use in envelope of global element. 09/06: Payload should be specified using a choice rather than xs:any 027 SH: Property precedence tables 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Two things missing from the existing precedence trees. Firstly, does not show alternates (eg, initiator v initiatorkind). Secondly, need a tree per concrete DFDL object (eg, element). SH to update. 29/04: No progress 06/05: SH is updating tables which will be ready for next call 13/05: SH emailed updated version. AP commented.. See minutes for issues and property changes. 20/05: Updated version circulated. Review before next call and be ready for vote. 27/05: Updated version circulated. more comments raised. 03/06: Further updates to clarify 'core'. Also identified missing design for outputMinLength 09/06: 028 SH: Variable markup 08/04: Discussed briefly at end of call, IBM to see whether there any use cases that require recursive use of DFDL. 15/04: Use case was distributed and will be discussed on next call. 22/04: The use case in question is EDI where the terminating markup for the payload segments is defined in the ISA envelope segment. The markup is modelled as an element of simple type where the allowable markup values are defined as enums on the type. But we need to handle two cases - firstly where the envelope is present, so the value used by the payload is taken from the envelope. Secondly where only the payload is present. Here we need a way of scanning for all the enum values, and adopting the one we actually find, when parsing. And using a default when unparsing. SH to explore use of a DFDL variable, where the variable has a default, but also has a type that is the same as the markup element - that way we get to use the enums without defining everything twice. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. 06/05: No progress 13/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Progress made and will tie to other actions 03/06: General desire to avoid having to introduce variable markup in V1. Proposed having a property to control case behaviour of all syntax (initiator, terminator,separator) rather than separate ones for each. Similar property to 'values' (textZeroRep, textBooleanTrueRep, etc). and allowing lists of values. SH need to solve remaining uses case as described in action 026 09/06: SH proposal discussed. ICU questions to be researched 029 MB: valueCalc (output length calculation) 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Action allocated to MB, this is to complete the work started at the Hursley WG F2F meeting. 29/04: No progress 06/05: MB will have update for next call 13/05: MB will have update for next call 20/05: Some progress. will be circulated this week 27/05: MB circulated proposal and got comments. Will update and review on next call 03/06: Discussed proposal. MB to update dealing with uses cases raised. Options include a new lenghtKind='Reference' to make it easier to distinguish from fixed length case. Or use outputLengthCalc to separate calculation of parsing and unparsing length. 09/06: SH/AP proposal discussed and MB to document 033 AP/TK: Assert/Discriminator semantics. AP to document. TK to check uses of discriminator besides choice. 08/04: In progress within IBM 22/04: Waiting for TK to return from leave to complete. 29/04: TK has sent examples shown need for discriminators beyond choice. Agreed. MB to respond to TK 06/05: Discussed suggestion of adding type indicator to discriminator. MB to provide examples. 15/03: Semantic documented in v034. MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator 20/05: MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator (but lower priority than action 029) 27/05: No Progress (lower priority) 03/06: No Progress (lower priority) 09/06: No Progress (lower priority) 037 All: Approach for XML Schema 1.0 UPA checks. 22/04: Several non-XML models, when expressed in their most obvious DFDL Schema form, would fail XML Schema 1.0 Unique Particle Attribution checks that police model ambiguity. And even re-jigging the model sometimes fails to fix this. Note this is equally applicable to XMl Schema 1.1 and 1.0. While the DFDL parser/unparser can happily resolve the ambiguities, the issue is one of definition. If an XSD editor that implements UPA checks is used to create DFDL Schema, then errors will be flagged. DFDL may have to adopt the position that: a)DFDL parser/unparser will not implement some/all UPA checks (exact checks tbd) b) XML Schema editors that implement UPA checks will not be suitable for all DFDL models c) If DFDL annotations are removed, the resulting pure XSD will not always be valid (ie, the equivalent XML is ambiguous and can't be modelled by XML Schema 1.0) Ongoing in case another solution can be found. 29/04: Will ask DG and S Gao for opinion before closing 06/05: Discussed S Gao email and suggestions. Decided need to review all XML UPA rules and decide which apply to dfdl. 20/05: SH or SKK to investigate 27/05: No Progress 03/06: The concern is that some dfdl schemas will fail UPA check when validation is turned on or when editted using tooling that enforces UPA checks. Renaming fields will resolve some/most issues. Need documentation that describes issue and best practice. 038 MB: Submit response to OMG RFI for non-XML standardization 22/04: First step is for MB to mail the OGF Data Area chair to say that we want to submit 29/04: MB has been in contact with OMG and will sunbit dfdl. 06/05: MB has prepared response to OMG. Will send DFDL sepc v033 20/05: Response has been sent to OMG based on v034 27/05: Awaiting response from OMG. 03/06: On hold 042 MB: Complete variable specification. To include how properties such as encoding can be set externally. Must be a known variable name. 06/05: No progress 20/05: AP to make proposal 27/05: MB proposed differentiating between input and output variables to avoid unnecessary evaluations during parse and unparse. Need to complete rest of variable specification. 03/06: Pointed out problem of declaring variables input or output when used to define syntax which is used both times. MB to update proposal to include how variables are set externally and how specific properties such as encoding are set. 09/06: SKK to use example to dicument his proposal 043 13/05: Types in the infoset. Currently infoset types have defined value space but that implies a parser would have to validate input. Is this correct? 20/05: SH No progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress 09/06: SH proposed staying with XML built-in types. Closed 044 13/05: Bidi 20/05: AP: will check what IBM products support. 27/05: Bidi is supported so will be needed in dfdl v1 03/06: No Progress 09/06: No Progress 045 20/05 AP: Speculative Parsing 27/05: Psuedo code has been circulated. Review for next call 03/06: Comments received and will be incorporated 09/06: Progress but not discussed 047 20/05 AP: Scoping for non-format annotations 27/05: Discussed briefly. AP to distribute 03/06: Proposal discussed briefly. Will be updated. 09/06: Doc emailed. Awaiting outcome of variable to define/setvariable rules. 048 20/05: AP investigate Restart 27/05: Suggest RESTART is not part of the scope for DFDL. 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Closed 049 20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas 03/06: not discussed 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Proposed dropping xs:any support 051 Scoping rules. MB: to document change to scoping rules to satisfy implementation concerns Alan Powell MP 211, IBM UK Labs, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, England Notes Id: Alan Powell/UK/IBM email: alan_powell(a)uk.ibm.com Tel: +44 (0)1962 815073 Fax: +44 (0)1962 816898 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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Re: [DFDL-WG] Variable definitions in the defineFormat block
by Steve Hanson 17 Jun '09

17 Jun '09

Suman Whatever you come up with needs to treat dfdl:defineVariableBlock (or whatever we call it) the same as other 'global' DFDL annotations like dfdl:defineTextNumberFormat and dfdl:defineTextCalendarFormat. Currently those are only allowed at schema level. So are you proposing that all these 'global' annotations can also live inside a dfdl:defineFormat annotation? You say best practice is to constrain the variable block locally. Please can you state the reasons why this is. Regards Steve Hanson Programming Model Architect WebSphere Message Brokers Hursley, UK Internet: smh(a)uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 Suman Kalia/Toronto/IBM@IBMCA 16/06/2009 16:44 To Alan Powell/UK/IBM@IBMGB, Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB cc dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Subject Variable definitions in the defineFormat block Alan/Steve - Changes after our meeting this morning (June 16, 2009) Define a variable format block just like we define textNumberFormat. The variable block could be at schema level but preferably should be defined within the defineFormat definition so that variables are scoped to format definition and do not pollute the schema namespace.. Variable block is referenced from dfdl:format annotation just like textNumberFormat block is referenced through textNumberFormatRef annotation. It addresses the problem hilited today in the meeting related to semantics of dfdl:ref="myFormat" annotation on a xsd constructs. The net effect of this annotation is as if the dfdl:format annotation (along with the attribute settings) is specified explicitly on the xsd construct. By providing a level of indirection and referencing variable block through varRef annotations, we have permitted visibility to variables but not to the definition of variables. Excerpts from MyEnvelopeFormat.xsd - attached for perusal.. Also attached is the [attachment "dfdl_variables_example_update.zip" deleted by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM] PI for the example ( see updated xsd files under the folder enveloper_skk) <xsd:annotation> <xsd:appinfo source="http://dataformat.org/"> <dfdl:defineFormat name="MyEnvelopeFormat" baseFormat="dfdlDefaultFormat:defaultFormat" >  <dfdl:format byteOrder="big-Endian" varRef="./MyEnvelopeFormatVariables"/>      <dfdl:defineVariableBlock name="MyEnvelopeFormatVariables"> <dfdl:defineVariable name="sep" type= "string" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name="enc" type= "string" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name= "outputDirPathSep" type="string" default="/" use="output" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name="outputMsgKind" type="string" use="output" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name="inputMsgKind" type="string" use="input" /> </dfdl:defineVariableBlock> </dfdl:defineFormat> </xsd:appinfo> </xsd:annotation> Suman Kalia IBM Toronto Lab WMB Toolkit Architect and Development Lead WebSphere Business Integration Application Connectivity Tools http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmb.h… Tel : 905-413-3923 T/L 969-3923 Fax : 905-413-4850 T/L 969-4850 Internet ID : kalia(a)ca.ibm.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

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Variable definitions in the defineFormat block
by Suman Kalia 16 Jun '09

16 Jun '09

Alan/Steve - Changes after our meeting this morning (June 16, 2009) Define a variable format block just like we define textNumberFormat. The variable block could be at schema level but preferably should be defined within the defineFormat definition so that variables are scoped to format definition and do not pollute the schema namespace.. Variable block is referenced from dfdl:format annotation just like textNumberFormat block is referenced through textNumberFormatRef annotation. It addresses the problem hilited today in the meeting related to semantics of dfdl:ref="myFormat" annotation on a xsd constructs. The net effect of this annotation is as if the dfdl:format annotation (along with the attribute settings) is specified explicitly on the xsd construct. By providing a level of indirection and referencing variable block through varRef annotations, we have permitted visibility to variables but not to the definition of variables. Excerpts from MyEnvelopeFormat.xsd - attached for perusal.. Also attached is the PI for the example ( see updated xsd files under the folder enveloper_skk) <xsd:annotation> <xsd:appinfo source="http://dataformat.org/"> <dfdl:defineFormat name="MyEnvelopeFormat" baseFormat="dfdlDefaultFormat:defaultFormat" >  <dfdl:format byteOrder="big-Endian" varRef="./MyEnvelopeFormatVariables"/>      <dfdl:defineVariableBlock name="MyEnvelopeFormatVariables"> <dfdl:defineVariable name="sep" type= "string" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name="enc" type= "string" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name= "outputDirPathSep" type="string" default="/" use="output" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name="outputMsgKind" type="string" use="output" /> <dfdl:defineVariable name="inputMsgKind" type="string" use="input" /> </dfdl:defineVariableBlock> </dfdl:defineFormat> </xsd:appinfo> </xsd:annotation> Suman Kalia IBM Toronto Lab WMB Toolkit Architect and Development Lead WebSphere Business Integration Application Connectivity Tools http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmb.h… Tel : 905-413-3923 T/L 969-3923 Fax : 905-413-4850 T/L 969-4850 Internet ID : kalia(a)ca.ibm.com

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Fw: Minute for OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 8-10 2009 ( Action item 042)
by Suman Kalia 15 Jun '09

15 Jun '09

Alan, >>> SKK proposed scoping by putting dfdl:defineVariable within a dfdl:defineFormat.. Will update the file path example to illustrate the design. Attached is the original example re-worked by defining variables in the define format.. -- directory enveloper_skk contains the xsds based on the proposal.. Suman Kalia IBM Toronto Lab WMB Toolkit Architect and Development Lead WebSphere Business Integration Application Connectivity Tools http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmb.h… Tel : 905-413-3923 T/L 969-3923 Fax : 905-413-4850 T/L 969-4850 Internet ID : kalia(a)ca.ibm.com ----- Forwarded by Suman Kalia/Toronto/IBM on 06/15/2009 04:40 PM ----- From: Steve Hanson <smh(a)uk.ibm.com> To: Alan Powell <alan_powell(a)uk.ibm.com> Cc: dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org, dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org Date: 06/12/2009 09:30 AM Subject: Re: [DFDL-WG] Minute for OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 8-10 2009 Alan Thanks for writing up the three days worth of discussions. A couple of small corrections: 1) Peter Lambros & Tim Kimber took part in some of the calls. 2) Action 028 Variable Markup The uses cases for variable markup are: a) Case insensitivity of data (eg, true & TRUE for text boolean) b) Case insensitivity of markup (eg, hdr & HDR for initiator) c) Different possible values for non-white space markup (eg, @ and # for separator) d) Different possible values for data (eg, true & yes for text boolean) e) Encoding of markup different to encoding of data (eg, initiator and terminator different to data) SH proposed a solution to each of these that did not require variable markup recursive use of DFDL see email 9/6/2009. After discussion so minor changes were agreed and will be documented. Variable markup recursive use of DFDL will not be supported for markup in DFDL v1 (it is used for dfdl:prefixLengthType property still) 3) Action 043 Types in the infoset. It was agreed that the types in the infoset will be schema the built-in types. When parsing, sufficient checking validation occurs to ensure the data can be converted to the built-in type. Rules have been defined for the valid data representations for each built-in type. Regards Steve Hanson Programming Model Architect WebSphere Message Brokers Hursley, UK Internet: smh(a)uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 Alan Powell/UK/IBM@IBMGB Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org 11/06/2009 15:43 To dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org cc Subject [DFDL-WG] Minute for OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 8-10 2009 Open Grid Forum: Data Format Description Language Working Group OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 8-10 2009 These minutes cover the series of meetings and calls which took place June 8-10 2009 Meeting opened, 14:00 UK Attendees Steve Hanson (IBM) Mike Beckerle (Oco) Suman Kalia (IBM) Alan Powell (IBM) Stephanie Fetzer (IBM) Apologies Agenda: Action 026 Envelopes and payloads It is expected that an xs:choice will be the way that payloads are defined in an envelope. xs:any support, as currently defined is not sufficient for this purpose (see action 050). There will be no support for dynamic binding of envelope and payload at runtime. Markup define in the data is covered under action 042 Variables Action 027 Property Precedence Tables are being updated to incorporate recent decisions. Action 028 Variable Markup The uses cases for variable markup are: a) Case insensitivity of data (eg, true & TRUE for text boolean) b) Case insensitivity of markup (eg, hdr & HDR for initiator) c) Different possible values for non-white space markup (eg, @ and # for separator) d) Different possible values for data (eg, true & yes for text boolean) e) Encoding of markup different to encoding of data (eg, initiator and terminator different to data) SH proposed a solution to each of these that did not require variable markup see email 9/6/2009. After discussion so minor changes were agreed and will be documented. Variable markup will not be supported in DFDL v1 Action 029 valueCalc SH and AP proposed that a new xpath function ( or new parameter on dfdl:length) that gave the representation length of an element without padding or truncation being applied allowed all the uses cases to be supported. The meaning of the various lengthKinds is unchanged. In particular lengthKind='explicit' always gets the length from the dfdl:length property on parsing and unparsing even when it is an expression. If the expression gets the length from a previous data field then the new function can be used to ensure that the field contains the correct length. MB to update description MB to update grammar diagrams to add padding fields. Action 042 Variables. The uses cases for variables are 1. Extracting syntax data fields 2. As an indicator to identify Payload 3. As an easier way to set bits in bitmap 4. As the way dfdl properties can be set from outside the parser. And the following aspects need to be defined Scoping of defineVariable naming/namespaces - include/import Unparsing Variable Type - enums Multiple setVariables in loops etc SKK proposed scoping by putting dfdl:defineVariable within a dfdl:defineFormat.. Will update the file path example to illustrate the design. Action 043 Types in the infoset. It was agreed that the types in the infoset will be schema the built-in types. Sufficient validation occurs to ensure the data can be converted to the built-in type. Rules have been defined the valid data representations for each built-in type. Action 042 Scoping for non-format annotations Scoping rules have been defined and agreed. Awaiting the resolution of defineVariable discussion Action 050 xs:any Support The support for xs:any is currently limited to allowing initiated string fields which is very limited. Support should be either dropped or extended to allow complex content. It is proposed that xs:any is dropped from dfdl V1. Implement concerns with current scoping rules. Concerns have been raised that the current scoping rules make it difficult to design good implementations. In particular it is difficult for an editor to be able to should which dfdl properties are set on an element without extensive tree walking. A dfdl schema validator would not be able to tell the context where global components where reused to global components would have to be valid in their own right. A number of possible solutions were discussed including removing scoping and introducing dfdl:schema wide defaults. A proposal to keep scoping but modify the rules was the favoured option. MB to document. Next call 16 and 17th June 14:00 UK Scheduled for 2 hours Meeting closed, 16:30 UK Actions raised at this meeting No Action 051 Scoping rules. MB: to document change to scoping rules to satisfy implementation concerns Current Actions: No Action 012 AP/SH: Update decimalCalendarScheme 10/9: Not allocated yet 17/9: No update 24/9: Add calendar binary formats to actions 22/10: No progress 16/1: proposal distributed and discussed. Will be redistributed 21/1: add locale, 04/02: changed from locale to specific properties 18/2: Need more investigation of ICU strict/lax behaviour. 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: AP to complete asap once the ICU strict/lax behaviour is understood. 29/04: No progress 06/05: No progress 13/05: Calendar has been added to latest spec version v034 but still a few details to clarify. 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress (low priority) 09/06: No Progress (low priority) 026 SH: Envelopes and Payloads 08/04: Not discussed explicity, but recursive use of DFDL is tied up with this 22/04: Two aspects. Firstly compositional - do sufficient mechanisms exist to model an envelope with a payload that varies. Secondly markup syntax - this might be defined in the envelope. The second of these is very much tied up with the variable markup action 028, so will be considered there. SH to verify the composition aspect. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. related to Action 028 06/05: No progress 06/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Still a number of aspects to be decided. - Compostion - Does the envelope and payload need to be defined in the same schema or should they be dynamically bound at runtime? - Compostion- How is a variable payload specified. Choice or xs:any; New action raised to discuss xs:any - extracting dymanic syntax from data. Covered by action 029 valuecalc. 03/06: Dynamic runtime binding will not be supported. SH investigating use of variables to enable standalone and use in envelope of global element. 09/06: Payload should be specified using a choice rather than xs:any 027 SH: Property precedence tables 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Two things missing from the existing precedence trees. Firstly, does not show alternates (eg, initiator v initiatorkind). Secondly, need a tree per concrete DFDL object (eg, element). SH to update. 29/04: No progress 06/05: SH is updating tables which will be ready for next call 13/05: SH emailed updated version. AP commented.. See minutes for issues and property changes. 20/05: Updated version circulated. Review before next call and be ready for vote. 27/05: Updated version circulated. more comments raised. 03/06: Further updates to clarify 'core'. Also identified missing design for outputMinLength 09/06: 028 SH: Variable markup 08/04: Discussed briefly at end of call, IBM to see whether there any use cases that require recursive use of DFDL. 15/04: Use case was distributed and will be discussed on next call. 22/04: The use case in question is EDI where the terminating markup for the payload segments is defined in the ISA envelope segment. The markup is modelled as an element of simple type where the allowable markup values are defined as enums on the type. But we need to handle two cases - firstly where the envelope is present, so the value used by the payload is taken from the envelope. Secondly where only the payload is present. Here we need a way of scanning for all the enum values, and adopting the one we actually find, when parsing. And using a default when unparsing. SH to explore use of a DFDL variable, where the variable has a default, but also has a type that is the same as the markup element - that way we get to use the enums without defining everything twice. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. 06/05: No progress 13/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Progress made and will tie to other actions 03/06: General desire to avoid having to introduce variable markup in V1. Proposed having a property to control case behaviour of all syntax (initiator, terminator,separator) rather than separate ones for each. Similar property to 'values' (textZeroRep, textBooleanTrueRep, etc). and allowing lists of values. SH need to solve remaining uses case as described in action 026 09/06: SH proposal discussed. ICU questions to be researched 029 MB: valueCalc (output length calculation) 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Action allocated to MB, this is to complete the work started at the Hursley WG F2F meeting. 29/04: No progress 06/05: MB will have update for next call 13/05: MB will have update for next call 20/05: Some progress. will be circulated this week 27/05: MB circulated proposal and got comments. Will update and review on next call 03/06: Discussed proposal. MB to update dealing with uses cases raised. Options include a new lenghtKind='Reference' to make it easier to distinguish from fixed length case. Or use outputLengthCalc to separate calculation of parsing and unparsing length. 09/06: SH/AP proposal discussed and MB to document 033 AP/TK: Assert/Discriminator semantics. AP to document. TK to check uses of discriminator besides choice. 08/04: In progress within IBM 22/04: Waiting for TK to return from leave to complete. 29/04: TK has sent examples shown need for discriminators beyond choice. Agreed. MB to respond to TK 06/05: Discussed suggestion of adding type indicator to discriminator. MB to provide examples. 15/03: Semantic documented in v034. MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator 20/05: MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator (but lower priority than action 029) 27/05: No Progress (lower priority) 03/06: No Progress (lower priority) 09/06: No Progress (lower priority) 037 All: Approach for XML Schema 1.0 UPA checks. 22/04: Several non-XML models, when expressed in their most obvious DFDL Schema form, would fail XML Schema 1.0 Unique Particle Attribution checks that police model ambiguity. And even re-jigging the model sometimes fails to fix this. Note this is equally applicable to XMl Schema 1.1 and 1.0. While the DFDL parser/unparser can happily resolve the ambiguities, the issue is one of definition. If an XSD editor that implements UPA checks is used to create DFDL Schema, then errors will be flagged. DFDL may have to adopt the position that: a)DFDL parser/unparser will not implement some/all UPA checks (exact checks tbd) b) XML Schema editors that implement UPA checks will not be suitable for all DFDL models c) If DFDL annotations are removed, the resulting pure XSD will not always be valid (ie, the equivalent XML is ambiguous and can't be modelled by XML Schema 1.0) Ongoing in case another solution can be found. 29/04: Will ask DG and S Gao for opinion before closing 06/05: Discussed S Gao email and suggestions. Decided need to review all XML UPA rules and decide which apply to dfdl. 20/05: SH or SKK to investigate 27/05: No Progress 03/06: The concern is that some dfdl schemas will fail UPA check when validation is turned on or when editted using tooling that enforces UPA checks. Renaming fields will resolve some/most issues. Need documentation that describes issue and best practice. 038 MB: Submit response to OMG RFI for non-XML standardization 22/04: First step is for MB to mail the OGF Data Area chair to say that we want to submit 29/04: MB has been in contact with OMG and will sunbit dfdl. 06/05: MB has prepared response to OMG. Will send DFDL sepc v033 20/05: Response has been sent to OMG based on v034 27/05: Awaiting response from OMG. 03/06: On hold 042 MB: Complete variable specification. To include how properties such as encoding can be set externally. Must be a known variable name. 06/05: No progress 20/05: AP to make proposal 27/05: MB proposed differentiating between input and output variables to avoid unnecessary evaluations during parse and unparse. Need to complete rest of variable specification. 03/06: Pointed out problem of declaring variables input or output when used to define syntax which is used both times. MB to update proposal to include how variables are set externally and how specific properties such as encoding are set. 09/06: SKK to use example to dicument his proposal 043 13/05: Types in the infoset. Currently infoset types have defined value space but that implies a parser would have to validate input. Is this correct? 20/05: SH No progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress 09/06: SH proposed staying with XML built-in types. Closed 044 13/05: Bidi 20/05: AP: will check what IBM products support. 27/05: Bidi is supported so will be needed in dfdl v1 03/06: No Progress 09/06: No Progress 045 20/05 AP: Speculative Parsing 27/05: Psuedo code has been circulated. Review for next call 03/06: Comments received and will be incorporated 09/06: Progress but not discussed 047 20/05 AP: Scoping for non-format annotations 27/05: Discussed briefly. AP to distribute 03/06: Proposal discussed briefly. Will be updated. 09/06: Doc emailed. Awaiting outcome of variable to define/setvariable rules. 048 20/05: AP investigate Restart 27/05: Suggest RESTART is not part of the scope for DFDL. 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Closed 049 20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas 03/06: not discussed 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Proposed dropping xs:any support 051 Scoping rules. MB: to document change to scoping rules to satisfy implementation concerns Closed actions: Work items: No Item target version status 003 Variables - ??, 2008 (Mike) 005 Improvements on property descriptions - ??, 2008 (All - split TBD) 006 Envelopes and Payloads (Steve) - Apr 30, 2008 007 (from draft 32) valueCalc (Mike) - ??, 2008 mostly complete 008 (from draft 32) Property precedence for writing (Steve) - under review 009 (from draft 32) Variable markup (Steve) - Mar 31, 2008 proposal needs writing up 011 (from draft 32) How speculative parsing works (combining choice and variable-occurence - currently these are separate) ??, 2008 (IBM) in progress 012 (from draft 32) Reordering the properties discussion: move representation earlier, improve flow of topics ??, 2008 (Alan) not started 027 Calendar schemes 034 032 Floating components 033 Changes from action 020 and 027 - renaming properties etc 035 Remove unorderedInitiated, add initiated content (a041) 036 Update dfdl schema with change properties (Suman) 037 Infoset text codepage 038 Improve length section 039 Change scoping of simple types (A 046) 040 Document outputMinLength (A027) 042 mapping of the dfdl infoset to XDM Not required for V1 specification Alan Powell MP 211, IBM UK Labs, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, England Notes Id: Alan Powell/UK/IBM email: alan_powell(a)uk.ibm.com Tel: +44 (0)1962 815073 Fax: +44 (0)1962 816898 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 http://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 http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg

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Fw: Recursive use of DFDL for variable markup - action 028 - updated
by Steve Hanson 15 Jun '09

15 Jun '09

The use cases for considering the inclusion of the recursive use of DFDL to define markup or other DFDL properties are: a) Case insensitivity of data (eg, true & TRUE for text boolean) b) Case insensitivity of markup (eg, hdr & HDR for initiator) c) Different possible values for non-white space markup (eg, @ and # for separator) d) Different possible values for data (eg, true & yes for text boolean) e) Encoding of markup different to encoding of data (eg, initiator and terminator different to data) The proposal is to use various existing mechanisms to handle all these use cases, and negate the need to include recursive use of DFDL in 1.0. a) Case insensitivity of data (eg, true & TRUE for text boolean) - Use a single flag dfdl:ignoreCase to cover all affected properties - Properties: - dfdl:occursStopValue - dfdl:numberZeroRep ** - dfdl:nilValues - dfdl:textBooleanTrue - dfdl:textBooleanFalse - dfdl:numberInfinityRep ** - dfdl:numberNanRep ** - dfdl:numberExponentCharacter ** b) Case insensitivity of markup (eg, hdr & HDR for initiator) - Use same flag dfdl:ignoreCase to cover all affected properties - Properties: - dfdl:initiator - dfdl:terminator - dfdl:separator c) Different possible values for non-white space markup (eg, @ and # for separator) - Use multi-value property. Propose that property name remains singular. - Properties: - dfdl:initiator - dfdl:terminator - dfdl:separator d) Different possible values for data (eg, true & yes for text boolean) - Use multi-value property. Propose that property name remains singular, so dfdl:nilValues becomes dfdl:nilValue singular. - Properties: - dfdl:occursStopValue - dfdl:numberZeroRep ** - dfdl:nilValues - dfdl:textBooleanTrue - dfdl:textBooleanFalse e) Encoding of markup different to encoding of data (eg, initiator and terminator different to data) - Use <xs:sequence> to wrap the element and carry the markup, for example: <sequence dfdl:encoding="ascii" dfdl:separator=":"> <sequence dfdl:encoding="ebcdic" dfdl:initiator="VAL" dfdl:terminator="END"> <element name="val" type="..." dfdl:encoding="ascii" /> </sequence> </sequence> - This should be able to handle all cases of what is a rare occurrence anyway, and still allows speculative parsing rules to apply. - This technique also allows you to change the dfdl:ignoreCase property between markup and data. - Alternative is to treat the markup as a value (the EDI scenario) - this is the subject of a separate action 026, which will be solved using variables or another technique, but not by using DFDL recursively. There are some other properties to which cases a), b), c), d) could apply, but it has been decided that the flexibility is not needed in practice. - dfdl:textPadCharacter - dfdl:escapeCharacter - dfdl:escapeForEscapeCharacter - dfdl:escapeBlockStart - dfdl:escapeBlockEnd - dfdl:numberGroupSeparator - dfdl:numberDecimalSeparator ** ICU assumes a single char for nan, infinity, and exponent. That's too restrictive for us, so propose using the DFDL nan, infinity and exponent properties like the zero rep property - they are used to pre-process the data for ICU on parsing, and applied to the ICU output on unparsing. For date/time support, the comparisons made by ICU when checking days, months, etc are case-insensitive, so DFDL does not need to provide any extra behaviour. Regards Steve Hanson Programming Model Architect WebSphere Message Brokers Hursley, UK Internet: smh(a)uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 ----- Forwarded by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM on 09/06/2009 13:27 ----- Steve Hanson/UK/IBM@IBMGB Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces(a)ogf.org 15/04/2009 13:47 To dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org cc Subject [DFDL-WG] Recursive use of DFDL for variable markup - use case >From last week's call: 7. Recursive use of DFDL for variable markup Use of a DFDL annotated element/type to describe an initiator, length prefix, terminator, separator, etc. Steve suggested the most important use of "variable markup-like mechanism" in IBM's WTX product is to reference a location earlier in the bit stream where a delimiter value is found. We handle this already by use of a path expression. The additional variable markup mechanism was to avoid proliferation of keywords for various corner cases on initiator, terminator and separator. Eg., what if you want the initiator to be "Name" or "name" only, not "NAME", "nAmE", etc. So case insensitive is not expressive enough. This can always be modeled, just not as an initiator tag. Feeling was to leave out variable markup (other than for prefix lengths) for v1.0, and to propose the minimum set of extra properties that can be used to address the common use cases, but that IBM needed to see whether this satisfied all WTX use cases. Regards Steve Hanson Programming Model Architect WebSphere Message Brokers Hursley, UK Internet: smh(a)uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 -- dfdl-wg mailing list dfdl-wg(a)ogf.org http://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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Minute for OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 8-10 2009
by Alan Powell 12 Jun '09

12 Jun '09

Open Grid Forum: Data Format Description Language Working Group OGF DFDL Working Group Calls, June 8-10 2009 These minutes cover the series of meetings and calls which took place June 8-10 2009 Meeting opened, 14:00 UK Attendees Steve Hanson (IBM) Mike Beckerle (Oco) Suman Kalia (IBM) Alan Powell (IBM) Stephanie Fetzer (IBM) Apologies Agenda: Action 026 Envelopes and payloads It is expected that an xs:choice will be the way that payloads are defined in an envelope. xs:any support, as currently defined is not sufficient for this purpose (see action 050). There will be no support for dynamic binding of envelope and payload at runtime. Markup define in the data is covered under action 042 Variables Action 027 Property Precedence Tables are being updated to incorporate recent decisions. Action 028 Variable Markup The uses cases for variable markup are: a) Case insensitivity of data (eg, true & TRUE for text boolean) b) Case insensitivity of markup (eg, hdr & HDR for initiator) c) Different possible values for non-white space markup (eg, @ and # for separator) d) Different possible values for data (eg, true & yes for text boolean) e) Encoding of markup different to encoding of data (eg, initiator and terminator different to data) SH proposed a solution to each of these that did not require variable markup see email 9/6/2009. After discussion so minor changes were agreed and will be documented. Variable markup will not be supported in DFDL v1 Action 029 valueCalc SH and AP proposed that a new xpath function ( or new parameter on dfdl:length) that gave the representation length of an element without padding or truncation being applied allowed all the uses cases to be supported. The meaning of the various lengthKinds is unchanged. In particular lengthKind='explicit' always gets the length from the dfdl:length property on parsing and unparsing even when it is an expression. If the expression gets the length from a previous data field then the new function can be used to ensure that the field contains the correct length. MB to update description MB to update grammar diagrams to add padding fields. Action 042 Variables. The uses cases for variables are Extracting syntax data fields As an indicator to identify Payload As an easier way to set bits in bitmap As the way dfdl properties can be set from outside the parser. And the following aspects need to be defined Scoping of defineVariable naming/namespaces - include/import Unparsing Variable Type - enums Multiple setVariables in loops etc SKK proposed scoping by putting dfdl:defineVariable within a dfdl:defineFormat.. Will update the file path example to illustrate the design. Action 043 Types in the infoset. It was agreed that the types in the infoset will be schema the built-in types. Sufficient validation occurs to ensure the data can be converted to the built-in type. Rules have been defined the valid data representations for each built-in type. Action 042 Scoping for non-format annotations Scoping rules have been defined and agreed. Awaiting the resolution of defineVariable discussion Action 050 xs:any Support The support for xs:any is currently limited to allowing initiated string fields which is very limited. Support should be either dropped or extended to allow complex content. It is proposed that xs:any is dropped from dfdl V1. Implement concerns with current scoping rules. Concerns have been raised that the current scoping rules make it difficult to design good implementations. In particular it is difficult for an editor to be able to should which dfdl properties are set on an element without extensive tree walking. A dfdl schema validator would not be able to tell the context where global components where reused to global components would have to be valid in their own right. A number of possible solutions were discussed including removing scoping and introducing dfdl:schema wide defaults. A proposal to keep scoping but modify the rules was the favoured option. MB to document. Next call 16 and 17th June 14:00 UK Scheduled for 2 hours Meeting closed, 16:30 UK Actions raised at this meeting No Action 051 Scoping rules. MB: to document change to scoping rules to satisfy implementation concerns Current Actions: No Action 012 AP/SH: Update decimalCalendarScheme 10/9: Not allocated yet 17/9: No update 24/9: Add calendar binary formats to actions 22/10: No progress 16/1: proposal distributed and discussed. Will be redistributed 21/1: add locale, 04/02: changed from locale to specific properties 18/2: Need more investigation of ICU strict/lax behaviour. 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: AP to complete asap once the ICU strict/lax behaviour is understood. 29/04: No progress 06/05: No progress 13/05: Calendar has been added to latest spec version v034 but still a few details to clarify. 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress (low priority) 09/06: No Progress (low priority) 026 SH: Envelopes and Payloads 08/04: Not discussed explicity, but recursive use of DFDL is tied up with this 22/04: Two aspects. Firstly compositional - do sufficient mechanisms exist to model an envelope with a payload that varies. Secondly markup syntax - this might be defined in the envelope. The second of these is very much tied up with the variable markup action 028, so will be considered there. SH to verify the composition aspect. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. related to Action 028 06/05: No progress 06/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Still a number of aspects to be decided. - Compostion - Does the envelope and payload need to be defined in the same schema or should they be dynamically bound at runtime? - Compostion- How is a variable payload specified. Choice or xs:any; New action raised to discuss xs:any - extracting dymanic syntax from data. Covered by action 029 valuecalc. 03/06: Dynamic runtime binding will not be supported. SH investigating use of variables to enable standalone and use in envelope of global element. 09/06: Payload should be specified using a choice rather than xs:any 027 SH: Property precedence tables 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Two things missing from the existing precedence trees. Firstly, does not show alternates (eg, initiator v initiatorkind). Secondly, need a tree per concrete DFDL object (eg, element). SH to update. 29/04: No progress 06/05: SH is updating tables which will be ready for next call 13/05: SH emailed updated version. AP commented.. See minutes for issues and property changes. 20/05: Updated version circulated. Review before next call and be ready for vote. 27/05: Updated version circulated. more comments raised. 03/06: Further updates to clarify 'core'. Also identified missing design for outputMinLength 09/06: 028 SH: Variable markup 08/04: Discussed briefly at end of call, IBM to see whether there any use cases that require recursive use of DFDL. 15/04: Use case was distributed and will be discussed on next call. 22/04: The use case in question is EDI where the terminating markup for the payload segments is defined in the ISA envelope segment. The markup is modelled as an element of simple type where the allowable markup values are defined as enums on the type. But we need to handle two cases - firstly where the envelope is present, so the value used by the payload is taken from the envelope. Secondly where only the payload is present. Here we need a way of scanning for all the enum values, and adopting the one we actually find, when parsing. And using a default when unparsing. SH to explore use of a DFDL variable, where the variable has a default, but also has a type that is the same as the markup element - that way we get to use the enums without defining everything twice. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. 06/05: No progress 13/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Progress made and will tie to other actions 03/06: General desire to avoid having to introduce variable markup in V1. Proposed having a property to control case behaviour of all syntax (initiator, terminator,separator) rather than separate ones for each. Similar property to 'values' (textZeroRep, textBooleanTrueRep, etc). and allowing lists of values. SH need to solve remaining uses case as described in action 026 09/06: SH proposal discussed. ICU questions to be researched 029 MB: valueCalc (output length calculation) 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Action allocated to MB, this is to complete the work started at the Hursley WG F2F meeting. 29/04: No progress 06/05: MB will have update for next call 13/05: MB will have update for next call 20/05: Some progress. will be circulated this week 27/05: MB circulated proposal and got comments. Will update and review on next call 03/06: Discussed proposal. MB to update dealing with uses cases raised. Options include a new lenghtKind='Reference' to make it easier to distinguish from fixed length case. Or use outputLengthCalc to separate calculation of parsing and unparsing length. 09/06: SH/AP proposal discussed and MB to document 033 AP/TK: Assert/Discriminator semantics. AP to document. TK to check uses of discriminator besides choice. 08/04: In progress within IBM 22/04: Waiting for TK to return from leave to complete. 29/04: TK has sent examples shown need for discriminators beyond choice. Agreed. MB to respond to TK 06/05: Discussed suggestion of adding type indicator to discriminator. MB to provide examples. 15/03: Semantic documented in v034. MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator 20/05: MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator (but lower priority than action 029) 27/05: No Progress (lower priority) 03/06: No Progress (lower priority) 09/06: No Progress (lower priority) 037 All: Approach for XML Schema 1.0 UPA checks. 22/04: Several non-XML models, when expressed in their most obvious DFDL Schema form, would fail XML Schema 1.0 Unique Particle Attribution checks that police model ambiguity. And even re-jigging the model sometimes fails to fix this. Note this is equally applicable to XMl Schema 1.1 and 1.0. While the DFDL parser/unparser can happily resolve the ambiguities, the issue is one of definition. If an XSD editor that implements UPA checks is used to create DFDL Schema, then errors will be flagged. DFDL may have to adopt the position that: a)DFDL parser/unparser will not implement some/all UPA checks (exact checks tbd) b) XML Schema editors that implement UPA checks will not be suitable for all DFDL models c) If DFDL annotations are removed, the resulting pure XSD will not always be valid (ie, the equivalent XML is ambiguous and can't be modelled by XML Schema 1.0) Ongoing in case another solution can be found. 29/04: Will ask DG and S Gao for opinion before closing 06/05: Discussed S Gao email and suggestions. Decided need to review all XML UPA rules and decide which apply to dfdl. 20/05: SH or SKK to investigate 27/05: No Progress 03/06: The concern is that some dfdl schemas will fail UPA check when validation is turned on or when editted using tooling that enforces UPA checks. Renaming fields will resolve some/most issues. Need documentation that describes issue and best practice. 038 MB: Submit response to OMG RFI for non-XML standardization 22/04: First step is for MB to mail the OGF Data Area chair to say that we want to submit 29/04: MB has been in contact with OMG and will sunbit dfdl. 06/05: MB has prepared response to OMG. Will send DFDL sepc v033 20/05: Response has been sent to OMG based on v034 27/05: Awaiting response from OMG. 03/06: On hold 042 MB: Complete variable specification. To include how properties such as encoding can be set externally. Must be a known variable name. 06/05: No progress 20/05: AP to make proposal 27/05: MB proposed differentiating between input and output variables to avoid unnecessary evaluations during parse and unparse. Need to complete rest of variable specification. 03/06: Pointed out problem of declaring variables input or output when used to define syntax which is used both times. MB to update proposal to include how variables are set externally and how specific properties such as encoding are set. 09/06: SKK to use example to dicument his proposal 043 13/05: Types in the infoset. Currently infoset types have defined value space but that implies a parser would have to validate input. Is this correct? 20/05: SH No progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress 09/06: SH proposed staying with XML built-in types. Closed 044 13/05: Bidi 20/05: AP: will check what IBM products support. 27/05: Bidi is supported so will be needed in dfdl v1 03/06: No Progress 09/06: No Progress 045 20/05 AP: Speculative Parsing 27/05: Psuedo code has been circulated. Review for next call 03/06: Comments received and will be incorporated 09/06: Progress but not discussed 047 20/05 AP: Scoping for non-format annotations 27/05: Discussed briefly. AP to distribute 03/06: Proposal discussed briefly. Will be updated. 09/06: Doc emailed. Awaiting outcome of variable to define/setvariable rules. 048 20/05: AP investigate Restart 27/05: Suggest RESTART is not part of the scope for DFDL. 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Closed 049 20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas 03/06: not discussed 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Proposed dropping xs:any support 051 Scoping rules. MB: to document change to scoping rules to satisfy implementation concerns Closed actions: Work items: No Item target version status 003 Variables - ??, 2008 (Mike) 005 Improvements on property descriptions - ??, 2008 (All - split TBD) 006 Envelopes and Payloads (Steve) - Apr 30, 2008 007 (from draft 32) valueCalc (Mike) - ??, 2008 mostly complete 008 (from draft 32) Property precedence for writing (Steve) - under review 009 (from draft 32) Variable markup (Steve) - Mar 31, 2008 proposal needs writing up 011 (from draft 32) How speculative parsing works (combining choice and variable-occurence - currently these are separate) ??, 2008 (IBM) in progress 012 (from draft 32) Reordering the properties discussion: move representation earlier, improve flow of topics ??, 2008 (Alan) not started 027 Calendar schemes 034 032 Floating components 033 Changes from action 020 and 027 - renaming properties etc 035 Remove unorderedInitiated, add initiated content (a041) 036 Update dfdl schema with change properties (Suman) 037 Infoset text codepage 038 Improve length section 039 Change scoping of simple types (A 046) 040 Document outputMinLength (A027) 042 mapping of the dfdl infoset to XDM Not required for V1 specification Alan Powell MP 211, IBM UK Labs, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, England Notes Id: Alan Powell/UK/IBM email: alan_powell(a)uk.ibm.com Tel: +44 (0)1962 815073 Fax: +44 (0)1962 816898 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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leading/trailing skip bytes
by Mike Beckerle 11 Jun '09

11 Jun '09

This comment appears in draft 034 with respect to leading/trailing skip bytes. Since I am in there fixing up the grammar and associated pictures I'd like to fix this also if a change is needed. Unfortunately, MS Word change tracking says this comment is by "Lab User" ... so I have no idea who said this, but I assume it's an IBMer. In our MRM model, for repeating element we state that a leading skipCount applies only to first occurrence of array element and trailing skipCount applies to all elements of the array. The model in that sense is not symmetrical. I thinking if we should model this properly for array where we state that an array construct as such has a prefix Region and suffix Region which carry these alignment attributes. I will try to find the COBOL test case which demonstrates this issue. Right now leading/trailing skip bytes are symmetric, and would apply to every element of an "array". There is no asymetry as per this comment. Can someone check into this so I can fix these grammars/diagrams including this change (if needed)? ...mike

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Agenda for OGF WG call 10 June 2009
by Alan Powell 10 Jun '09

10 Jun '09

Agenda: 1. Go through actions. 2. Implementation concerns The implementation of a dfdl editor, validator and parser have highlighted some some concern. SH to send email 3. AOB Current Actions: No Action 012 AP/SH: Update decimalCalendarScheme 10/9: Not allocated yet 17/9: No update 24/9: Add calendar binary formats to actions 22/10: No progress 16/1: proposal distributed and discussed. Will be redistributed 21/1: add locale, 04/02: changed from locale to specific properties 18/2: Need more investigation of ICU strict/lax behaviour. 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: AP to complete asap once the ICU strict/lax behaviour is understood. 29/04: No progress 06/05: No progress 13/05: Calendar has been added to latest spec version v034 but still a few details to clarify. 20/05: No Progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress (low priority) 09/06: No Progress (low priority) 026 SH: Envelopes and Payloads 08/04: Not discussed explicity, but recursive use of DFDL is tied up with this 22/04: Two aspects. Firstly compositional - do sufficient mechanisms exist to model an envelope with a payload that varies. Secondly markup syntax - this might be defined in the envelope. The second of these is very much tied up with the variable markup action 028, so will be considered there. SH to verify the composition aspect. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. related to Action 028 06/05: No progress 06/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Still a number of aspects to be decided. - Compostion - Does the envelope and payload need to be defined in the same schema or should they be dynamically bound at runtime? - Compostion- How is a variable payload specified. Choice or xs:any; New action raised to discuss xs:any - extracting dymanic syntax from data. Covered by action 029 valuecalc. 03/06: Dynamic runtime binding will not be supported. SH investigating use of variables to enable standalone and use in envelope of global element. 09/06: Payload should be specified using a choice rather than xs:any 027 SH: Property precedence tables 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Two things missing from the existing precedence trees. Firstly, does not show alternates (eg, initiator v initiatorkind). Secondly, need a tree per concrete DFDL object (eg, element). SH to update. 29/04: No progress 06/05: SH is updating tables which will be ready for next call 13/05: SH emailed updated version. AP commented.. See minutes for issues and property changes. 20/05: Updated version circulated. Review before next call and be ready for vote. 27/05: Updated version circulated. more comments raised. 03/06: Further updates to clarify 'core'. Also identified missing design for outputMinLength 09/06: 028 SH: Variable markup 08/04: Discussed briefly at end of call, IBM to see whether there any use cases that require recursive use of DFDL. 15/04: Use case was distributed and will be discussed on next call. 22/04: The use case in question is EDI where the terminating markup for the payload segments is defined in the ISA envelope segment. The markup is modelled as an element of simple type where the allowable markup values are defined as enums on the type. But we need to handle two cases - firstly where the envelope is present, so the value used by the payload is taken from the envelope. Secondly where only the payload is present. Here we need a way of scanning for all the enum values, and adopting the one we actually find, when parsing. And using a default when unparsing. SH to explore use of a DFDL variable, where the variable has a default, but also has a type that is the same as the markup element - that way we get to use the enums without defining everything twice. 29/04: SH and AP working on proposal. 06/05: No progress 13/05: No progress 20/05: No Progress 27/05: Progress made and will tie to other actions 03/06: General desire to avoid having to introduce variable markup in V1. Proposed having a property to control case behaviour of all syntax (initiator, terminator,separator) rather than separate ones for each. Similar property to 'values' (textZeroRep, textBooleanTrueRep, etc). and allowing lists of values. SH need to solve remaining uses case as described in action 026 09/06: SH proposal discussed. ICU questions to be researched 029 MB: valueCalc (output length calculation) 08/04: Not discussed 22/04: Action allocated to MB, this is to complete the work started at the Hursley WG F2F meeting. 29/04: No progress 06/05: MB will have update for next call 13/05: MB will have update for next call 20/05: Some progress. will be circulated this week 27/05: MB circulated proposal and got comments. Will update and review on next call 03/06: Discussed proposal. MB to update dealing with uses cases raised. Options include a new lenghtKind='Reference' to make it easier to distinguish from fixed length case. Or use outputLengthCalc to separate calculation of parsing and unparsing length. 09/06: SH/AP proposal discussed and MB to document 033 AP/TK: Assert/Discriminator semantics. AP to document. TK to check uses of discriminator besides choice. 08/04: In progress within IBM 22/04: Waiting for TK to return from leave to complete. 29/04: TK has sent examples shown need for discriminators beyond choice. Agreed. MB to respond to TK 06/05: Discussed suggestion of adding type indicator to discriminator. MB to provide examples. 15/03: Semantic documented in v034. MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator 20/05: MB to provide examples of need for scope indicator on discriminator (but lower priority than action 029) 27/05: No Progress (lower priority) 03/06: No Progress (lower priority) 09/06: No Progress (lower priority) 037 All: Approach for XML Schema 1.0 UPA checks. 22/04: Several non-XML models, when expressed in their most obvious DFDL Schema form, would fail XML Schema 1.0 Unique Particle Attribution checks that police model ambiguity. And even re-jigging the model sometimes fails to fix this. Note this is equally applicable to XMl Schema 1.1 and 1.0. While the DFDL parser/unparser can happily resolve the ambiguities, the issue is one of definition. If an XSD editor that implements UPA checks is used to create DFDL Schema, then errors will be flagged. DFDL may have to adopt the position that: a)DFDL parser/unparser will not implement some/all UPA checks (exact checks tbd) b) XML Schema editors that implement UPA checks will not be suitable for all DFDL models c) If DFDL annotations are removed, the resulting pure XSD will not always be valid (ie, the equivalent XML is ambiguous and can't be modelled by XML Schema 1.0) Ongoing in case another solution can be found. 29/04: Will ask DG and S Gao for opinion before closing 06/05: Discussed S Gao email and suggestions. Decided need to review all XML UPA rules and decide which apply to dfdl. 20/05: SH or SKK to investigate 27/05: No Progress 03/06: The concern is that some dfdl schemas will fail UPA check when validation is turned on or when editted using tooling that enforces UPA checks. Renaming fields will resolve some/most issues. Need documentation that describes issue and best practice. 038 MB: Submit response to OMG RFI for non-XML standardization 22/04: First step is for MB to mail the OGF Data Area chair to say that we want to submit 29/04: MB has been in contact with OMG and will sunbit dfdl. 06/05: MB has prepared response to OMG. Will send DFDL sepc v033 20/05: Response has been sent to OMG based on v034 27/05: Awaiting response from OMG. 03/06: On hold 042 MB: Complete variable specification. To include how properties such as encoding can be set externally. Must be a known variable name. 06/05: No progress 20/05: AP to make proposal 27/05: MB proposed differentiating between input and output variables to avoid unnecessary evaluations during parse and unparse. Need to complete rest of variable specification. 03/06: Pointed out problem of declaring variables input or output when used to define syntax which is used both times. MB to update proposal to include how variables are set externally and how specific properties such as encoding are set. 09/06: SKK to use example to dicument his proposal 043 13/05: Types in the infoset. Currently infoset types have defined value space but that implies a parser would have to validate input. Is this correct? 20/05: SH No progress 27/05: No Progress 03/06: No Progress 09/06: SH proposed staying with XML built-in types. Closed 044 13/05: Bidi 20/05: AP: will check what IBM products support. 27/05: Bidi is supported so will be needed in dfdl v1 03/06: No Progress 09/06: No Progress 045 20/05 AP: Speculative Parsing 27/05: Psuedo code has been circulated. Review for next call 03/06: Comments received and will be incorporated 09/06: Progress but not discussed 047 20/05 AP: Scoping for non-format annotations 27/05: Discussed briefly. AP to distribute 03/06: Proposal discussed briefly. Will be updated. 09/06: Doc emailed. Awaiting outcome of variable to define/setvariable rules. 048 20/05: AP investigate Restart 27/05: Suggest RESTART is not part of the scope for DFDL. 03/06: not discussed 09/06: Closed 049 20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas 03/06: not discussed 050 27/05: xs:any currently limited to initiated text element. Is this sufficient? Should xs:any in its current form be deferred? 03/06: not discussed Alan Powell MP 211, IBM UK Labs, Hursley, Winchester, SO21 2JN, England Notes Id: Alan Powell/UK/IBM email: alan_powell(a)uk.ibm.com Tel: +44 (0)1962 815073 Fax: +44 (0)1962 816898 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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