Re: Recursion free VOTable?

From: Eric Saunders <saunders-at-astro.ex.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:01:55 +0100 (BST)


This seems to be a known bug, but doesn't seem to be being dealt with (outstanding for 6 months):

http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS-2262

I would suggest mailing the axis-dev list (axis-dev-at-ws.apache.org) and pointing out that this issue directly affects the astronomy community. Then we would know whether the issue is likely to be resolved in the near future - or have it's priority bumped as a result of user base requirement pressure. I don't see why recursive schema elements should pose any special problems to parsing software.

Cheers

Eric



Eric Saunders
eSTAR Project (http://www.estar.org.uk)
Astrophysics Group
University of Exeter

On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, Roy Williams wrote:

> Writing this question is my action from the NVO TechWG phone call this week.
>
> There was a long discussion of VOTable and its use in SOAP services and other
> sophisticated XML applications. The complaint is that some XML tools do not
> work properly with the VOTable schema because the SCHEMA IS RECURSIVE. People
> mentioned Axis version 1.3 wsdl2java, and some code-binding tools. The
> recursion is in two places: (a) RESOURCE containing RESOURCE elements and (b)
> OPTION containing OPTION elements. The VOTable schema is legal. But the tools
> clearly do not work with all legal schema. We thought back in 2002 that the
> tools would "catch up" and the problem would evaporate. But now it is four
> years later. Is it time for a pragmatic simplification?
>
> QUESTION for this group:
> Is it desirable to build an official standard "VOTableLight" schema which
> does not have recursion, yet validates most instances of VOTable?
> -- The simplified structure would have RESOURCE contains TABLEs, rather than
> RESOURCE contains TABLEs and RESOURCEs. -- It could handle a list of tables,
> but not a tree of tables. -- Every "light" table would validate under the
> full schema.
>
> Roy
>
>
> California Institute of Technology
> 626 395 3670
Received on 2006-04-24Z11:03:04