Fw: [dfdl-wg] alternate syntax for DFDL annotations

[Suman Kalia]

Hi Mike -- We will be creating XML schema to model our annotations and the 
attributes applicable to the representation of a particular element/type 
will be grouped within the  complex type of the annotation schema.   My 
preference will be use annotation approach consistently in DFDL. 

Moreover the attributes defined in the compact form are not easily 
accessible from the XML Schema APIs, you have to look into the DOMNode 
associated with the  XSDElementDeclaration to get access to such 
attributes; it makes the programming task a little harder.  Having said 
that SOAP encoded schemas use this compact form to identify the type and 
dimensions of the array types; some folks like this approach and some hate 
it.. 


Suman Kalia
IBM Toronto Lab
WebSphere Business Integration Application Connectivity Tools 
Tel : 905-413-3923  T/L  969-3923
Fax : 905-413-4850
Internet ID : kalia at ca.ibm.com
----- Forwarded by Suman Kalia/Toronto/IBM on 03/02/2005 12:38 PM -----

Mike Beckerle <mike.beckerle at ascentialsoftware.com> 
Sent by: owner-dfdl-wg at ggf.org
03/01/2005 03:53 PM

To
dfdl-wg at gridforum.org
cc

Subject
[dfdl-wg] alternate syntax for DFDL annotations






Up til now we've considered DFDL annotations only as inside the appinfo 
context. However, we should consider whether we should use non-native 
attributes as well or
as an alternative: E.g., simple DFDL rep properties could also be 
expressed like this:
    <xs:element name="foo" 
                type="xs:string"
                dfdl:repType="text" 
                dfdl:charset="UTF-8" 
                dfdl:repLength="10"/>
 
This has the advantages of compactness, and is a fully supported way of 
extending XML Schema. That is, using non-native attributes is a supported 
extension idiom. This won't handle things that really need the syntactic 
support of element structure to express their complexity, e.g., things 
like specifying text delimiters with quoting and escape-sequence 
specifications. For those we'll still need to open an appinfo annotation 
up. However, for basic things like byteOrder and such it is far more 
attractive syntactically to use non-native attributes than appinfo 
annotations.
 
Comments?
 
...mikeb 
 
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