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24
Jan
2006

Schema-based XPath tool

by William (@vambenepe on Twitter)

Most XML editors offer an XPath tool that allows one to test and fine-tune XPath expressions by running them against XML documents. Very helpful but also potentially very deceptive. With such a tool it is very easy to convince oneself that an XPath expression is correct after running it against a few instance documents. And a month later the application behave erratically (in many cases it probably won’t break it will execute the request on the wrong element which is worst) because the XPath expression is ran on a different document and what it returns is not what the programmer had in mind. This is especially likely to occur as people use and abuse shortcuts such as “//” and ignore namespaces.

What we need is an XPath tool that can run not only run the XPath against an instance document but can also run it against a schema. In the later case, the tool would flag any portion of the schema that can possibly correspond to a node in the resulting nodeset. It would force programmers to realize that their //bar can match the /foo/bar that they want to reach but it could also match something that falls under the xsd:any at the end of the schema. And the programmer has to deal with that.

Related posts:

  1. Just-in-scope (or just-if-i-care) validation
  2. The elusive XPath nodeset serialization
  3. XPath brain teasers: graph queries in XPath 1.0
  4. Less is more: inventory of XPath subsets
  5. Who needs XPath fragment-level PUT?
  6. We won’t get rid of SSN-based authentication anytime soon…
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Everything, Implementation, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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One Response to “Schema-based XPath tool”

  1. pankaj_kumar Says:
    February 21st, 2006 at 12:26 am

    Welcome to the world of “dynamic programming”! BTW, as Bruke Eckel would say, you can trade strong typing for strong testing(ref: http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/log-0025 ).

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