DC Kelley
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Joined: 24 Jun 2004
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 Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 8:04 am Post subject: ASN to XML conversion styles |
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At 06:32 AM 10/2/2006, Rausch, Robert wrote:
Both implement sets of rules for translating between ASN to XML.
The Mini-Edit tool uses the SAE stds one that were developed in concert with ITS needs and these rules differ in minor ways from the ones developed by OSS and others (who were more interested in maintaining their tool investment and viewed XML as something of a threat). As you know XML allows a very wide rage of legal style, both of these efforts sought to trim down the possible expressions to a sane sub-set that could be uniformly applied to produce consistent XML for use and re-use.
During the development we worked with them to minimize most issues. A few differences you may note are: * We expressly support the "extension" concept of local variables (the "..." in ASN) much better - a key need for ITS local deployments.
* We us a duel-mode handling of enumerations (allow both strings and integer vales representations) - needed for legacy support.
* Our naming rules automatically determine equivalent XML element/type names (as do they) but follow both the ASN rules as well as IEEE1488-ISO14817.
* We generally do not support complex macro definitions in the ASN, while they do (ITS does not use such macros).
* Neither way supports the XML keywords of ANY or SET concepts because there is no analogous ASN style.
* We in-line our comment fields as XML comments (they handle code comments differently depending on whose translators is used) This, by the way, is different then the Dept Justice style of making all comment into app-info tags
At a high level they are about the same, but many small differences exist. As we have grown the complexly of the ASN codes in ITS we have also added a number of conversion keywords that ITS now depends on the further guide the conversion process. For example you will see the term "UNTAGGED" used to suppress excessive XML tag naming in inner structures used often. You can find the keywords and their proper use described here http://www.itsware.net/miniedit/help/window_8_1.html There are also a number of quality checking rules implemented to detect problems that can occur in your ASN when converted to XML, see http://www.itsware.net/miniedit/help/Rule%209.html for a small set of these. Most stewards and deployments know that if they get the ASN right, the tool will do all the rest. so they seldom muck with these.
Back to keywords. The OSS conversion system has no such keywords as yet (in fact we have proposed that these keywords should be standardized for others to use). The system implemented in Mini-Edit also supports both implicit and explicit references to the data types in other bodies of work (needed again because the SDO has difference styles), I am not sure how OSS handles this. We also (recently) have added a revision issuing system in the schema files that matches the record revision system used by the SDO records. The OSS system does not need to cope with this unique ITS need, and only handles the mapping form an ASN module name to an XML namespace.
If you are producing a XML schema sets from the ASN found in Mini-Edit records I would also note that you have several control flags that can make the resulting XML verbose or terse with comments from the standard as you see fit. This can ever be used to put almost all of the descriptive text found in the printed standard into the schema if you so desire. This can be useful for "training schemas" See here for more details: http://www.itsware.net/miniedit/help/window_3_20.html
In summary, you need to use the ITS style of conversion if you want to produce XML that will work with the rest of the ITS world (and later perhaps also the DOJ and DHS systems of XML). The styles are all open, straight forward, and rather simple. You can do it by hand, or with many XML tools. If you have ASN (such as the stds) then you can have Mini-Edit convert it for you. |
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