From: senderista@... (Tobin Baker)
Date: 2001-09-18T09:44:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21297] Re: Ruby objects <-> XML: anyone working on this?

You're saying that SOAP doesn't properly serialize arbitrary graphs of
objects?  I don't know much about SOAP, but I thought you could do
something like

<Person id="Person-1">
  <name>dad</name>
</Person>

<Person id="Person-2">
  <name>son</name>
  <father href="#Person-1"/>
</Person>

<SOAP-ENC:Array name="people"
SOAP-ENC:arrayType="myNamespace:Person[2]">
  <item href="#Person-1"/>
  <item href="#Person-2"/> 
</SOAP-ENC:Array>

Kent Dahl <kentda@stud.ntnu.no> wrote in message news:<3BA659B9.EE8C7E78@stud.ntnu.no>...
> Michael Neumann wrote:
> > Try SOAP or XML-RPC for marshalling Ruby objects in a language-independent
> > format (requires SOAP4R or xmlrpc4r to be installed):
> 
> I looked at these some months ago, but I had a new look now on SOAP.
> (xmlrpc4r wouldn't install properly, I'll try again later.)
> 
> Nonetheless, it (SOAP) does not seem adequate for my needs:
>  1) Language/implementation specific metadata in datafile (still lots of
> type attribs)
>  2) I can't seem to get referential integrity.
>  3) The XML is less human-readable that I'd wish, mostly due to 1)
> 
> Seeing as point 2 is the show-stopper (for me), I'll elaborate.
> 
> <CODE>
> dad = Person.new
> son = Person.new
> son.father = dad
> people = [ dad, son ]
> aString   = SOAP::Marshal.marshal( people )
> xdad, xson = SOAP::Marshal.unmarshal( aString )
> </CODE>
> 
> Then 
> a) xdad.id != xson.father.id
> b) xdad.type != dad.type
> 
> So then I wonder, does SOAP, XMLRPC, XMarshal or any other XML based
> method of marshalling maintain referential integrity? (If that is the
> right word for it)