1. 16.2 scannablility with lengthKind pattern:  

2. Current Actions:

3 Steve H issues with draft 039

4 Tim's (major) issues with draft 039  

5 Status of specification  (for OGF28)




1.  16.2 scannablility with lengthKind pattern:  

In summary, you can use a data pattern on any element (complex, simple text, simple binary) as long as the bytes are legal in the stated encoding, which where binary data is involved in practice means an 8-bit ASCII encoding.

Binary data can be handled using some of the conveniences of text by way of treating it as text with encoding="iso-8859-1". In this case literal text, such as length patterns, is interpreted as in the iso-8859-1 character encoding, and the correspondence of byte values in the data to a string in the DFDL infoset is one to one. That is, byte with value N, produces an infoset character with character code N.



2. Current Actions:
No
Action
049
20/05 AP Built-in specification description and schemas
03/06: not discussed

24/06: No Progress

24/06: No Progress (hope to get these from test cases)

15/07: No progress. Once available, the examples in the spec should use the dfdl:defineFormat annotations they provide.

...

14/10: no progress

21/10: Discussed the real need for this being in the specification. It seemed that the main value is it define a schema location for downloading 'known' defaults from the web.
28/10: no progress

04/11: no progress

11/11: no update

18/11: no update

25/11: Agreed to try to produce for CSV and fixed formats

04/12: no update

09/12: no update

16/12: no update

23/12: no update

06/01: no progress. If there is no resource to complete this action it can be deferred

13/01:no progress

20/01: no progress

27/01: no progress

29/01: No progress.  The predefined formats do not need to be available when the spec is published.

Suman said that he had been mapping COBOL structures to DFDL and it didn't look as though the way text numbers are define is very usable. He will document for next call
03/02: No progress

10/02: No progress

17/03: No progress

24/03: No progress
066
Investigate format for defining test cases
25/11:IBM to see if it is possible to publish its test case format.

04/12: no update

09/12: no update

16/12: reminded dent to project manager

23/12: SH will send another reminder.

06/01: Another reminder will be sent

13/01: no update

20/01: no update

27/01: no progress

29/01: no progress

03/02: IBM is still investigating

10/02: IBM is still investigating

17/02: IBM is willing in principle to publish the test case format and some of the test cases. May need some time to build a 'compliance suite'

24/03: No progress
079
MB:Encoding for binary fields when lenghtkind is pattern
17/02: Discussed but no conclusion

24/03: Mike has found an encoding that matches the first 255 codepoints of iso 10646. Will document its use for binary fields.
080
AP:Clarify semantics of fn:poisition and fn:count
17/02: no progress

24/03: No progress
083
MB:To correct syntax diagram for FinalUnused and suggest wording for the Sequence section



3 Steve H issues with draft 039

1) Name of property dfdl:textNumberRepresentation is not consistent with dfdl:binaryNumberRep, dfdl:binaryFloatRep, etc.

2) The dfdl:numberPattern etc properties that have been moved from the defunct dfdl:textNumberFormat annotation to dfdl:element etc should be called dfdl:textNumberPattern etc. Otherwise users will think they apply to binary numbers too.

3) In section 14.3 on sequences, there are several sub-sections that talk about parsing according to different ways of specifying length (ie, lengthKind). But dfdl:sequence no longer carries dfdl:lengthKind so I think these sub-sections are not in the right place.  I think they should be in section 12, under the correct 12.3.x lengthKind sub-section.

4) Section 19 on built-in specifications. Given that we don't have any for public comment phase we should reword this section.


4 Tim's (major) issues with draft 039  

12.2 Delimiters: Text Markup
- The term 'Delimiters' is  not accurate. Most readers will not think of an initiator as a 'delimiter'.
- It's not 'Text' markup any more - especially since v0.39 has allowed lengthKind="delimited" for elements with binary representation.
Title should be 'Markup' and explanation can then deal with what it really is, rather than justifying the innaccurate title :-)

Syntax for specifying markup:
It's not clear from this description that each item in the space-separated list is a DFDL string literal.

initiator ( and all other space-separated properties )
It is not clear whether the order of the space-separated properties matters. Must the parser test them in the order in which they are specified?
( Q: What if %ES; is the first in the list? )

terminator:
is it OK if the final terminator is missing within the scope of a known-length parent? Seems like a reasonable extension of the rule ( in all other scenarios, the end of a known-length parent acts like the end of the data stream for items with its scope ).

documentFinalTerminatorCanBeMissing:
Let's try to avoid creating another property for the postfix separator scenario. I think this property provides a way of modelling the data naturally.
We can recommend use of infix-with-a-terminator rather than 'postfix' if the final terminator can be missing.

outputNewLine
Should we validate that the 'characterOrCharacters' are all newline characters from the set described by the %NL; mnemonic? Otherwise the DFDL serializer will output data which cannot be parsed by the DFDL parser.

dfdl:lengthKind endOfParent
'endOfParent' has almost the same meaning as 'delimited' so should have the same semantics.
·        the item’s terminator (if specified)
·        an enclosing construct’s separator or terminator
·        the end of an enclosing construct designated by its known length
·        the end of the data stream
The effect would be the the element could be ended by the nearest known length parent not just the immediate parent. Also the immediate parent could have lengthKind 'implicit'

choiceKind 'Fixed'
When lengthKind='implicit' all alternative branches of the choice are padded to the fixed length of the largest one so that overall the entire choice construct is fixed length

There must be a restriction that the length of at least one choice must be statically defined.



Regards

Alan Powell
Development - MQSeries, Message Broker, ESB
IBM Software Group, Application and Integration Middleware Software
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