From: kentda@...
Date: 2001-09-18T22:22:36+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21319] Re: Ruby objects <-> XML: anyone working on this?

On 17 Sep 2001, Tobin Baker wrote:
> 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

I'm saying I don't know to do it :-)

> <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>

Yes, this is very similar to what I'm looking for. However, my previous
looks at SOAP, had me worried about the "flattness" of this kind of
structure, since nearly everything is just an element with either data or
reference elements. (Leading to shallow, (human-)unreadable XML)
	I'm a bit brainwashed towards using the recursive tree-nature of
XML, so I would in this case prefer to see the Person elements inside the
Array element itself. That way most of the "tree-ish-ness" of any object
graph does get represented visually in the XML, and only those few places
where one object reappears, does it degenerate to hrefs...

-- 
<[ Kent Dahl ]>================<[ http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~kentda/ ]>
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