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On Wednesday 03 November 2004 10:51, Burak Emir wrote:
> Frans Englich wrote:
> >Let's say that for each file(in a directory hierarchy) we have an XML
> > document representing it, and it should specify the file's location in
> > the hierarchy, such that one can find out where it is located by only
> > inspecting the XML document for the file. Would this be appropriate?
>
> <snip/>
>
> >starting point..) -- would it then still be best to go XML instead of
> > simply having the whole path in a string? Yes, I doubt, because it seems
> > massively slow and I have never seen anyone do it which makes it feel
> > like trying to innovate(or I'm simply failing to realize the power of
> > XML?).
> >
> >The actual purpose is reports from a regression framework, which tell in
> > what file a certain test failed, and then the user is supposed to be able
> > to do queries similar to "show failures of text X in directory foo" and
> > then the reports which are generated by test X, and are in directory foo,
> > are returned.
>
> Data (like a path) should always be represented in a form that allows to
> easily do what one wants to do with it.
>
> If somewhere in your regression test framework, you need to make a
> system call, you will need a string representation.
>
> If that is the *only* thing for what you need the path (anticipating all
> future extensions things of your program), then I don't see why you
> would want to map the tree structure in your XML document.
>
> On the other hand, if you have some other use for the path (which would
> need parsing the string), it might be nice to parse it once and for all,
> and convert it back to string just for the system calls from above.
In this particular case a possibility could be to have both an element
representation, and the path in an attribute, for example.
Since a central use is selecting the fileS on the basis of an individual
directory or directory-series its path is part of, that means an element
representation is of interest, AFAICT. But otoh, if they all have absolute
paths, then an XSLT could simply do starts-with or contains, to get the
node-set, but perhaps that leads to ordinary escaping issues, and
nevertheless is restraining(perhaps the performance differences are
ignorable).
Cheers,
Frans
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