Nice. I don't think it is complete to actually use it for the real map
validation, but this is a great start. I guess the immediate value of
it is documenting the format for manual editing.
Now I am wondering where in the model lifecycle during development and
runtime would it be appropriate/useful to do automated validation of
the mapping? In other words where the benefit of validation would
justify the overhead? The map semantical problems are rare, as most
people are using the Modeler (that presumably generates a correct
mapping). So I can only think of cases that would help us internally,
but will not affect the end users:
* Validation as a part of map-saving unit tests
* Switching from manual XML parser to an auto-generated parser based
on schema (such as JAXB; although I decided against JAXB some time
ago, as it would add yet another hard dependency to Cayenne, and will
require a rewrite of a piece of Cayenne that already works well. So I
am just using it as an example).
Other ideas?
Andrus
On Dec 4, 2008, at 12:44 PM, Aristedes Maniatis wrote:
I've put together a preliminary schema. I am sure adjustment will be
needed, but I think it is a good first cut. I'd appreciate some
feedback about whether it validates your models, so please take your
xxx.map.xml file and hand edit the top of it to change this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<data-map project-version="3.0">
to this
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<data-map project-version="3.0" xmlns="http://cayenne.apache.org/xml/ns/map
" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance";
xsi:schemaLocation="http://apache.org/xml/ns/cayenne http://people.apache.org/~amaniatis/cayenneMap.xsd
">
Then please use a tool to validate this schema. Personally I use
Oxygen which is really nice, but anything will do. You can even
write a little Java tool to do it [1]. Ultimately that's how Cayenne
Modeler will validate the XML to see that it matches the schema.
We'll need to discuss how to name the namespace, and it might be
nice to put lots of documentation into the schema file itself which
will help people who want to dive in.
Ari
[1]
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/xml/validation/package-summary.html
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