comments inline
At 09:58 AM 5/31/2002 -0700, you wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Andrew Vardeman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 7:53 AM >Subject: RE: AW: How do you pass an XML document between Axis and .Net Cl >ient? > > >Ack! > > >Maybe this shouldn't bug me since the whole point of Axis is you're not > >supposed to care what's on the wire--but the notion of XML-encoding an > >entire XML document so it can be passed as a string via RPC, when instead > >you could just insert the literal document as the SOAP Body, makes no sense > >to me. > > > >well, imagine you are using a standard XML doc format, like say the 300+ >page Job description format for printing (http://www.cip4.org/). And imagine >that two years from now you might have to support the next version. > >if your endpoint has a method like submit(JDF descriptor) your runtime can >handle future versions of the format in the same endpoint, by looking at the >schema version of the payload and running with it. sure, but couldn't you get the same effect by dropping the XML document down a level in the SOAP Body, say, under an "<JDF>" label? You could define a request format like this: <docSubmission> <descriptor>some descriptor</descriptor> <JDF> <blah_blah_blah /> </JDF> </docSubmission> I understand your point, which is that RPC is good for passing typed parameters and you'll often want to pass some parameters along with an XML document. But RPC certainly isn't *necessary* for this. I suppose the argument would be that agreeing on a standard way of passing these parameters is better than defining your own request schema for every web service you write. > Also, with a 300 page >spec, you may want to handle it as SAX events, rather than in a DOM. I guess I'm thinking of things at the SOAP spec level rather than the specific implementation level, which is probably silly. Theoretically, couldn't a SOAP toolkit could give you SAX events from the SOAP Body just as easily as a complete DOM? I presume no toolkit actually does this. When I first looked into SOAP and didn't know about Axis, .NET, etc., I thought I would have to be constructing and disassembling SOAP Envelopes manually, so I'm still kind of stuck on what *could* be done according to the spec, as opposed to what is currently being done by specific implementations. >I have done this kind of thing with SVG files, because the rendering of the >SVG is handled by something that takes a file containing the SVG XML; our >methods were things like print(SVG,dpi,output-format); combining a large XML >parameter with a couple of primitive types. > >-steve
