Hello all
After a very long while committing accessory stuff, I have been back on
"serious" objects today. I just committed the following interface
together with support classes:
https://builds.apache.org/job/sis-jdk7/site/apidocs/org/apache/sis/xml/NilObject.html
In summary, the ISO 19115 standard (the standard which define metadata)
declare some metadata as optional, and some metadata as mandatory.
However the ISO 19139 standard (the standard which specify how to
express ISO 19115 in XML) said that we are allowed to omit a mandatory
metadata, provided that we explain why we omitted it. There is a list of
predefined NilReason which include: INAPPLICABLE, MISSING, TEMPLATE,
UNKNOWN, WITHHELD and OTHER.
In Java, we can not really express "nil value" by null, because "nil
value" are not completely nil... They may still be associated to XLink
or the above-cited NilReason. So the proposed approach, which was
implemented in Geotk, is to still return an instance of the metadata
object, but the instance additionally implements the NilObject marker
interface - meaning "I'm totally empty from an ISO 19115 point of view -
but I may still have some ISO 19139 attributes, in particular a
NilReason attribute" (sorry for the headache... The OGC/ISO standards
are very complex...). The above-cited javadoc contains an example of
what it looks like in XML.
Is there any comment about this approach?
Martin
