The XML parser functional specification for the new parser indicates that the dynamic default setting and semantic validation will no longer be a built-in feature in the parser.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/caiman/XML_Parsing/xml_1_func_spec.1.pdf Since DC uses the default setting and semantic validation feature of the existing parser (ManifestServ), and there's a requirement from the AI client redesign team to perform semantic validation of AI manifests, I have done some research on how we might offer dynamic default setting and semantic validation in the new parser. ManifestServ provides an infrastructure for default setting and semantic validation to happen when the input XML is parsed. Basically, the framework allows you to specify the list of functions to be used for default setting or validation, and then, associates a given node in the XML tree to one or more of these functions. While this works, and can be extended to use with the new parser, I want to check whether there are any standards for specifying default setting and semantic validation. I did not find anything for doing default setting, but I found many links related to semantic validation. However, all the standards for semantic validation seem to have a slight different meaning than the way we use it in ManifestServ. All references to semantic validation refers to validating contents of different fields within the same docuement based on some constrain or validating constrains between fields in different documents.(see references below) This is slightly different than our definition of semantic validation. In our existing usage model, we can validate between different fields in the same document, or between different documents. We can also validate the given data against any context or rules. Basically, since we offer a way for people to plug-in their own function, they can write their function to validate against anything that they want. Since our usage for "semantic validation" is slightly different than what all the standards specify, I think that we should come up with a slightly different term to describe what we do, so that there's no confusion about the functionality that we are offering. Based on my research so far, I couldn't find a better way to set up the infrastructure to do dynamic default setting and semantic validation. So, I am going to define the interface for the dynamic default setting and semantic validation modules for the new XML parser to be similar to the ones that's used for ManifestServ. I would need your feedback on: 1) Whether we should have a new name term to describe what we do for semantic validation? If so, your suggestion on the name. 2) If you have better ideas for setting up the dynamic default setting and semantic validation, I would like to hear them. 3) Do you think it is worth having dedicated modules for doing dynamic default setting and semantic validation? An application can easily have similar structure set up in the code after the data is parsed. I would like to discuss this during tomorrow's meeting. Please feel free to send your comments before or after the meeting too. Please send all your comments by 6/17/2009 COB as I will start the functional spec at that time. Thanks, --Karen ------------------ References: - http://www.clixml.org/index.html - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1703998 - http://lci.cs.ubbcluj.ro/ocle/um/xmlvalidation.htm
