Re: [boost] XML APIs: use cases, and wishes

From: Boris Kolpackov (boris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-09 16:56:20

Andreas,

Andreas Pokorny <andreas.pokorny_at_[hidden]> writes:

> Last time I had to
> process XML I wrote my own wrapper on top of SAX, which forwarded higher
> level events to xml-unaware structures. The model served well to directly
> map a fixed XML-format to C++ structures (also XML writing was supported).
>   The wrapper that forwarded all SAX events to the datastructures was
> generated from a single C++ expression, or several if recursion was
> required. I adopted a lot of spirits techinques to make it look nice.
> There were no intermediate data structures.
>
> In retrospective I also dislike my attempt, although it was better
> than working on xml document classes. It only worked with full xml
> documents, no partial parsing was supported. Furthermore it required a
> nearly direct mapping of xml elements to datastructures, different
> use cases which do not include a mapping of xml<->c++ werent considered.

We tried to solve this exact problem with the C++/Parser mapping for
XML Schema. The basic idea boils down to generating parser templates
for data types defined in XML Schema. Using these parser templates you
can build your own in-memory representations or perform immediate
processing of XML instance documents.

The following document has a quick introduction to the mapping:

http://codesynthesis.com/projects/xsd/documentation/cxx/parser/quick-guide/

hth,
-boris