xml-dev - Re: Getting information from a server

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Sarveshwar Rao Duddu wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am working on an application where a server will send an XML document to
> the client.
> This XML document may have references to entities which are external. And
> the data of
> those entities will be on the server - this is similar to the <IMG tag in
> HTML, the tag is sent
> as part of the document, the image data is available only on the server.
> 
> Supposing that the URI in the entity definition will be something like
> "X-Test://", is there
> any parser which after finding that "X-Test" is a protocol it cannot
> understand, request the
> application to make available the data? Or will I have to hack into the
> sources of the parser?

I guess the answer is "it depends". With Perl's XML::Parser (based on
expat) you can register an ExternEnt handler (and by inference I'm
assuming you can do that with expat itself), which will be called when an
external entity is referenced, then you're free to handle the scheme in
whatever manner you choose. 

Java parsers probably implement this slightly differently, hence the "it
depends". You're probably best looking at the SAX2 docs on
http://www.megginson.com, look for the EntityResolver method in the SAX2
API docs.

Of course if you didn't write the client application, then you're probably
out of luck!

-- 
<Matt/>

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org | AxKit: http://axkit.org


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