Yeah, the naming is purely coincidental. The two XMLSerializables
(and XMLEncoders) are not related to each other in no way. I'd say we
rename the util version (I am not so sure to what though).
It is technically possible to switch DataMap (de)serialization to
xml.XMLEncoder|Decoder (in fact I am using that mechanism JPA XML
loading with great success), but since it works the way it is, and
the DataMap format is very stable, I personally have very little
motivation to touch this code. Also probably adding 'decodeFromXML'
to util.XMLSerializable is not worth the trouble as this is a
specialized implementation not intended for general use.
Finally to say something good about "legacy" util.XMLEncoder/
util.XMLSerializable, I really like how it works for manual encoding
of a tree. It is very intuitive and has a number of helpful utility
methods [1]. Not coincidentally I implemented this interface for all
JPA mapping objects (even though they are not using it to load/store
themselves). It is invaluable for debugging chunks of the mapping.
Andrus
[1] http://cayenne.apache.org/doc/api/org/apache/cayenne/util/
XMLEncoder.html
On Nov 4, 2007, at 4:09 AM, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
There are two XMLSerializable interfaces. One in
org.apache.cayenne.util and one in org.apache.cayenne.xml.
They are very similar but the xml package one includes decodeFromXML
(XMLDecoder). CayenneDataObject is the only class which implements
decodeFromXML(XMLDecoder).
On the other hand classes which implement the util version of the
package instead use MapLoader to perform the decoding from XML in
the form of a SAX parser.
* can we rename these interfaces so they are more different (I
think one is a SAX decoder and the other DOM), or
* can CayenneMapEntry be somehow merged with XMLSerializable. They
apply to different classes now but I'm not sure why. (doesn't
everything in the map need to be XML serializable and everything
which is serializable is in the map?), or
* should we merge the two XMLSerializable interfaces and make
decodeFromXML a noop where is it not used
Ideally I'd have thought decodeFromXML() and encodeFromXML() are
always nice symmetric pairs but I'm thinking this would require a
change from using a SAX parser in MapLoader to using a DOM parser.
I'm just trying to understand this code as I navigate through it
working on some other things.
Ari
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