Flow questions

[Miles Elam]

With the hope of using WebDAV or XML POST to update XML items on the server, I've been looking at Flow. If you just want to see my flow questions, feel free to skip the preamble.

<PREAMBLE>

The back end data store is a PostgreSQL database whose relevant table looks something like this. It has been abbreviated for clarity.

CREATE TABLE "shows" (
"id" serial NOT NULL,
"category" character varying(96), -- Useful for searches by topic
"topic" character varying(64) NOT NULL,
"abstract" character varying(1024),
"promo" character varying(1024),
"content" text,
"liveDate" timestamp(0) with time zone,
Constraint "shows_pkey" Primary Key ("id")
);

The incoming XML is based upon simplified docbook and looks something like this:

<show xmlns="http://geekspeak.org/2.0";>
<showinfo>
<pubdate>2003-01-20T18:30:00-08:00</pubdate>
<topic>Small Web Dev Survival</topic>
<participationgroup>
<participant userid="3"/>
<participant userid="5"/>
<participant userid="7"/>
</participationgroup>
<promo>On the next Geek Speak: Jasper Larence, CEO of Words and Images of
Santa Cruz, joins the Geeks for a discussion about the status of
web development as a business. [The quick growth of the Internet lead to
an acute need for web development companies. The crash saw the death of
many of these new ventures.] The survival of the web creation industry
on GeekSpeak, Monday [tomorrow/tonight] at 6:30pm on Central Coast Public
Radio, KUSP.</promo>
<abstract>
<para>Jasper Larence, CEO of
<orgname><ulink url="http://www.wordsandimages.com";>Words &amp;
Images</ulink></orgname> of Santa Cruz, joins the Geeks for a
discussion about the status of web development as a business. The
quick growth of the Internet lead to a large need for web development
companies. The crash saw the death of many of these new ventures, but
some companies like Words &amp; Images are still around. Learn
why.</para>
</abstract>
</showinfo>
<section>
<title>What is web development?</title>
<para>Blah blah blah blah blah...</para>
</section>
</show>

At first, I thought to convert the XML into XSP/ESQL. That turned out to be a mess to the third power: a completely unmaintainable mess of markup and Java code. I wouldn't expect anyone to happily fix any of my bugs in that rats nest nor would I expect to happily fix them myself six months down the road.

The next thought was Actions, but that was just keeping the code relatively out of sight. It seemed fairly clumsy for any non-trivial amount (more than 100 lines) of logic and made the sitemap kinda crufty as well.

</PREAMBLE>



Next came Flow. Although I didn't have multiple pages to work with as is the case with a wizard, it seemed to make a lot of sense in a predominantly procedural logic approach. However, I ran into a few snags -- mostly related to lack of documentation (yes, I realize it's alpha and the API may be pulled out from under me...I'm prepared to deal with the search/replace/debug repercussions). I'll keep my code snippet as short as possible.

function saveShow () {
var showData;
try {
var factory = javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
var builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
var showDocument = builder.parse( /* Somehow get the XML POST data in here */ );

var showData = getShowData(showDocument);
} catch ( e ) {
sendPageAndContinue("showerror");
}

try {
var dbConn = /* Somehow get the datasource by name */.getConnection();
var dbStatement = dbConn.createStatement();
// ...snip a whole bunch of extraneous JDBC logic...
} catch (sqle) {
sendPageAndContinue("showerror");
}
}

1) How do I get XML POST data into the function (eg. equivalent to StreamGenerator)?
2) How do I look up a Cocoon datasource by name in JavaScript/Flow?
3) BSF question: Do I always have to call "foo.getBar()" or will "foo.bar" work?
4) Am I doing something that will drive me into a brick wall, but I can't see it yet? (Is this the correct approach to the problem?)

Thanks,

- Miles



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