I would second this approach. A payload string of XML data is just a string of value content to us.

Note however that in our proposed set of properties there is one "isXML" which is intended to facilitate the usage pattern of XML payload strings. This property is a boolean you can set to say that the string's content is a well formed XML document or a well-formed fragment of XML. This is just a shorthand for what would otherwise be a large set of quoting/escaping conventions, the use of a dynamic character set selected based on the encoding attribute in the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?> slug line (if present), etc.

(We would need to specify what the concept of "well formed fragment of XML" means. I think intuitively people know what this means, something intelligible to an XML parser, but we need to be explicit. It means a fragment of XML that begins and ends between two elements. Hence, is not a fragment that starts in the middle of any quoting construct, nor in the middle of a tag or attribute, etc. )

Mike Beckerle
STSM, Architect, Scalable Computing
IBM Software Group
Information Integration Solutions
Westborough, MA 01581
voice and FAX 508-599-7148
home/mobile office 508-915-4767


Steve Hanson <smh@uk.ibm.com>
Sent by: owner-dfdl-wg@ggf.org

02/01/2006 01:27 PM

To
dfdl-wg@ggf.org
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Subject
Re: [dfdl-wg] More documents





I'll see what I can come up with.

As far as the embedded XML goes, I put it there as we will be asked this
question. Thinking it through, maybe we should simply treat it as a BLOB
and leave it to the user to take and parse using an XML parser as an
independent operation. This is symmetric with an XML document containing a
non-XML BLOB as CDATA that needed to be parsed using DFDL.

Regards, Steve

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


                                                                         
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            01/02/2006 15:03                                              
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         
                                                                         




On Wednesday 01 February 2006 07:03, Steve Hanson wrote:

> - A portion of the data is encrypted, with fields in the message prior to
> the encrypted section providing the decryption keys etc. (X12 security
> segment motivates this)
> - Data where some XML is embedded in the middle
> - Data where decimal fields (say) are in a wacky encoding not supported
by
> stock DFDL properties (TLOG retail standard motivates here)
>

Thease are great examples.  Can someone give me fully documented
data files from which to try to construct such examples?

By the way, I'm not sure whether embedded XML is within the scope
of DFDL--it gets insanely hairy.

But the others are exactly the kinds of things that the core standard
must either cover or have an extension mechanism that covers.


--
---
Robert E. McGrath, Ph.D.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1205 West Clark
Urbana, Illinois 61801
(217)-333-6549

mcgrath@ncsa.uiuc.edu