Mike et al

Some comments on proposal-on-facets.doc prior to today's extra call:

- I had come to the same conclusion about deriving the dfdl:length of decimals etc from the min/max/inclusive/exclusive or totalDigits facets - it's a tooling feature not a DFDL spec feature. I did wonder whether that same argument could be applied to deriving dfdl:length of strings from length/maxLength but that would force the user to enter the same length twice which is poor usability. So I am happy with the proposed scope of dfdl:lengthKind="useSchemaFacet". Should we change the enum to "useSchemaLength" ?

- I don't think we should be considering dropping min/max/inclusive/exclusive or totalDigits facets. I might have a binary integer that I want to validate against a range - such an integer would not have a numberFormat.

- Dropping pattern facet prevents a user from validating that a fixed length or delimited string contains certain characters, eg, is pure alphabetic. I think pattern facet should be retained. We have them in MRM for validation so dropping is a functional loss.

- Let's only drop those facets that don't have a sensible validation semantic in DFDL. That to me means whitespace only.

Regards, Steve

Steve Hanson
WebSphere Message Brokers
Hursley, UK
Internet: smh@uk.ibm.com
Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848

Mike Beckerle <beckerle@us.ibm.com>
Sent by: dfdl-wg-bounces@ogf.org

03/10/2007 22:19

To	dfdl-wg@ogf.org
cc
Subject	[DFDL-WG] Minutes from 10/3 meeting

Attached is revised "facets" document based on discussion in the meeting.

Meeting friday on defaults/nulls/optionals.

Also discussed: OGF upcoming meeting - alan going - goals for this are - udpate on our progress and recruiting.

Also discussed: XPath 2.0 - spec is so huge it makes an excess burden for DFDL implementations if we say our expression language is all of Xpath 2.0.
Can we subset it? E.g., XPath 2.0 language constructs, but with the smaller XPath 1.0 function library?
This is not enough as we want to avoid even some language things e.g., we don't need the iteration constructs. What else?

Agreed that the most critical thing is that our path language is consistent with XPath 2.0 semantics.

Alan writing up a proposal.

Mike Beckerle
STSM, Architect, Scalable Computing
IBM Software Group
Information Platform and Solutions
Westborough, MA 01581
direct: voice and FAX 508-599-7148
assistant: Pam Riordan
priordan@us.ibm.com
508-599-7046
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