Chas,
What your talking about is object serilization - the helpers we both
currently have, and the ones I plan to rebuild do not care about the
output XML - it's more abstract than that (collections of implicit
conversions etc)
IMO - what your talking about is object serilization. There are a
bunch of frameworks out which do this very effectivly (for better or
worse, soap is an example of this), and personally, I'm not a fan of
it: for me, REST services should be a lightweight DSL -if you then
want automated tooling, just use WADL.
Cheers, Tim
Sent from my iPhone
On 1 Feb 2009, at 05:47, "Charles F. Munat" <c...@munat.com> wrote:
>
> Tim,
>
> I don't know much about the XMLApiHelper, but if you're headed down
> this
> route, there is an alternative syntax that you might want to consider.
>
> One of the things I might want to do with XML output from a REST
> server,
> for example, is create an interface to it using HTML. The easiest way
> would be by using XSLT (or Scala) to convert the XML to XHTML, e.g. to
> convert a collection of Users into a table.
>
> If each object/class has it's own element name, that makes things
> difficult. In that instance, I would program my REST server to output
> users thus:
>
> <collection className="User">
> <object className="User">
> <attribute name="id" format="integer">666</attribute>
> <attribute name="nameFirst" format="name">Lou</attribute>
> <attribute name="nameLast" format="surname">Cypher</attribute>
> <collection className="PhoneNumber">
> <object className="PhoneNumber">
> <attribute name="region">US</attribute>
> <attribute name="phoneType">mobile</attribute>
> <attribute name="areaCode" format="areaCode">666</attribute>
> <attribute name="exchange" format="exchange">666</attribute>
> <attribute name="number" format="phone">6666</attribute>
> <attribute name="extension" format="ext">6666</attribute>
> </object>
> <object className="PhoneNumber"/>
> </collection>
> </object>
> <object className="User"/>
> <object className="User"/>
> </collection>
>
> This allows me to write one script that converts all collections to
> tables, or alternatively to nested lists. It's more verbose (though
> some
> duplication could be eliminated), but it provides me with the
> information I need to do the conversion and format the results.
>
> Just a thought...
>
> Chas.
>
> Tim Perrett wrote:
>> Guys,
>>
>> Just doing some work with the XMLApiHelper and im finding some things
>> that can be improved. For instance, the trait provides createTag
>> which
>> you then have to override like so:
>>
>> def createTag(in: NodeSeq) = <api>{in}</api>
>>
>> IMO, it seems that this isnt ideal as if you were returning a list of
>> users, your xml would be:
>>
>> <api>
>> <user>....</user>
>> <user>....</user>
>> </api>
>>
>> It would be better to have a configurable root node, so its a more
>> logical semantic:
>>
>> <users>
>> <user>....</user>
>> <user>....</user>
>> </users>
>>
>> I've been playing around with the best way to do it and by changing
>> the implicits and the xml build methods I now have it so that you can
>> do:
>>
>> def listAllUsers = {
>> ...
>> ("users", listOfUsers)
>> }
>>
>> This appears to be the best way to do it, otherwise things start
>> getting messy?
>>
>> Whilst I can make these changes code wise, im very aware that ESME
>> uses this helper a lot and this would mean some significant breaking
>> changes in the api construction, both for ESME, and no doubt other
>> projects. IMHO, the change is worth the hassle as it will make
>> services up of more logically formed xml.
>>
>> What are people's thoughts?
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Tim
>>>
>
> >
>
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