Hello all! I've been having a look at the TODO for Struts 1.1, and some of the suggestions are quite interesting. Of particular interest is the proposal to introduce XPath as a mechanism to reference property names. Although it maybe early to discuss this, I'm interested in floating a few ideas/questions (although these may have already been addressed?) 1. Is it intended that the Struts team would implement their own XPath processing engine, or simply a set of interfaces and adapter classes to existing XPath implementations? (ie. Xalan, Saxon, etc) 2. How will beans become the target of an XPath expression? I have thought of the possibility of a class 'BeanDOMAdapter', that implements the org.w3c.Node interface... the standard bean introspection methods, BeanInfo and FeatureDescriptor classes, etc will then be used to determine which properties of a bean become elements, and which become attributes (although, possibly a simpler approach is to just assume that all properties of a bean become elements?). Evaluating an XPath expression against a bean is then simply a matter of passing the bean intto an instance of BeanDOMAdapter and feeding the DOMAdapter (which implements Node) into the XPath engine... (okay, its a little more complicated when you consider expressions that return node-sets). 3. How will the standard tags change such that XPaths will be introduced as an access path to properties. Will we test the 'property' attribute to see if it starts with an 'xpath:' prefix, otherwise treat it as a property name under the current syntax? Or will we introduce an 'xpath' attribute to each tag? Regards, James W. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- This e-mail is from Cards Etc Pty Ltd (ACN: 069 533 302). It may contain privileged and confidential information. It is intended for the named recipient(s) only. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify us immediately by reply e-mail or by phone on +61 2 9212 7773 & delete this e-mail from your system. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
