xml-dev - Re: How to ??

["Bill la Forge" <b.laforge@jxml.com>]

>If so, my reading is that those are deviations from the DOM Recommendation -- in
>other words, bugs.


Frankly, I think the problem is more with the fact that they are SAX-based. 

Complicating matters is the lack of a method for setSpecified (DOM is somewhat
incomplete from the perspective of an application) and a particular DOM implementation
which uses a private variable for the specified variable. (I haven't looked at the
JavaSoft implementation yet. This was true for just one DOM implementation.) 

But subclassing was still viable. We just had to define a second specified variable
and override the isSpecified method to use it. This will all be included in the upcoming
(and still open source) production release of MDSAX.

Adding specified to SAX is really pretty simple--no changes to any interfaces is needed.
Its just a matter of subclassing the existing AttributeList interface in either the parser or 
a filter which has access to default values. The DOM builder then can check for the use
of this extended interface to access the specified value.

I've appended the AttributeList and Attribute interfaces to this email. This is what we're
working with now, though your input would be welcome. In my mind, including these
interfaces (or something similar) in ModSAX/OpenSAX/SAX2 would be the best of all
worlds.

Bill

public interface MDAttributeList extends AttributeList
{
 /*
  * Make this attribute list a copy of another
  */
  public void
 copy(AttributeList attList);

 /*
  * Get an attribute object (by name)
  */
  public MDAttribute
 getMDAttribute(String name);

 /*
  * Get an attribute object (by position)
  */
  public MDAttribute
 getMDAttribute(int i);

 /*
  * Add an attribute
  */
  public void
 putMDAttribute(MDAttribute att);

 /*
  * Remove all attributes
  */
  public void
 clear();

 /*
  * Remove an attribute
  */
  public void
 removeMDAttribute(MDAttribute att);

 /*
  * Remove an attribute by name
  */
  public void
 removeMDAttribute(String name);

 /*
  * Remove an attribute by position
  */
  public void
 removeMDAttribute(int i);

 /**
  * Returns the specified property for the ith attribute.
  */
 public boolean getSpecified(int i);

 /**
  * Returns the specified property for the named attribute.
  */
 public boolean getSpecified(String name);
}


public interface MDAttribute
{
 /*
  * Make this attribute list another, except
  * that the name of the attribute is not changed.
  */
  public void
 copy(MDAttribute att);

  public String
 getName();

  public String
 getType();

  public void
 setType(String type);

  public String
 getValue();

  public void
 setValue(String value);

  public boolean
 getSpecified();

  public void
 setSpecified(boolean specified);
}



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