[XML-SIG] XML to Object translation

[uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]

> Rich Salz <rsalz@caveosystems.com> writes:
> 
> > > The idea is basically that when you have an XML document of a
> > > particular type (say RSS) you make a mapping file that describes
> > > how to create an object structure from the file. For RSS this
> > > might look as shown below.
> > 
> > I wonder if the syntax of that mapping file could be XSLT?
> 
> XSLT would work very well as long as it can handle the full
> transformation.  In the XSLT stylesheet, the "output schema" would
> follow a regular pattern, not unlike SOAP or WDDX, that can then
> easily be converted to objects.
> 
> The one drawback to using XSLT is that many conversions to objects
> require a little bit more code to get things to work well, so XSLT +
> some embedded scripting would be even better.

I disagree.  If we use a similar model as pickle, in most cases, all the user 
needs to provide is the equivalent of __getinitargs__.  I'd say the cases 
where __setstate__ type function is required would be infrequent.

Given this, it could be handled by special XSLT extension arguments that use 
its attributes to initialize the corresponding Python objects.  I think we 
still have this proposal floating somewhere on the Zope XMLObject Wiki.  I'll 
try to dig it up.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
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