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David Megginson writes:
>Gustaf Liljegren writes:
>
> > Got some inspiration from the "Looking for an example of a name
> > collission" thread. It's funny that no one seem to be able to
> > present a *good* working example of how namespaces solves name
> > conflicts. I'm not opposing namespaces myself, but I still try to
> > find the right place for them.
>
>Do you want a hypothetical example or a real-world example?
>Unfortunately, real-world XML is still a bit hard to come by even
>without vocabulary mixing, but it's easy enough to make up credible
>examples. Take something as simply as "vendor-id"; you might have
>something like...
Something that I have found in processing data from our ERP system is
that certain terms *do* have real-world namespace collisions that need
to be resolved by either messing with names, using namespaces or using
some other method of determining usage. For example, there are
"SalesOrder" and "PurchaseOrder" fields in a number of tables in the
database, and some of them are "our" numbers and some are the numbers
provided by the customer. Now, admittedly, in this case all of the
data is basically under my control for in-house usage, but if I'm
playing with data either from outside the company or mixed internally
and externally-generated, it is sort of handy to have some kind of
notification that "PurchaseOrder" is *our* purchase order or *their*
purchase order without having to parse the whole document and find out.
I'm certainly not up to speed enough on any of the debates to say one
method is better than another, as I'm just getting seriously involved
in using XML around the business, but I do know that there's certainly
a possibility of a real collision happening here. There are a number of
other fields with the same kind of issues in our ERP system, and I can
imagine that other systems would have similar "inbound vs. outbound"
problems with similar names.
Joe Mayer
Information Systems
Kathrein Inc, Scala Division
Medford OR
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