ISSUE 114: XML Serialization of references to Type

I think Frank’s proposal in the JIRA is pretty reasonable. As far as specific modifications to the text, the section “5.3 XML Representation of SDO Type and Property” seems like the obvious place. In any case, we need to correct this section, since it references SdoModel.xsd, which we renamed sdo-3.0.xsd. Here is a first draft for how the chapter could look:

The file sdo-3.0.xsd defines an XML document structure corresponding to SDO’s type and property metamodel which can be used when persisting or transporting an SDO type system, or portion thereof.

Special rules apply when marshalling or unmarshalling references to a type, for instance, when marshalling Property.type and Type.baseTypes. Note that these properties are non-containment references to DataObjects and therefore, unless special rules are defined for them, they would be rendered as an XPath pointing to the referenced type’s definition. This requires that all referenced types be part of the same XML, which is unnatural, especially when referencing SDO’s standard types, such as Int and String. Therefore, an implementation of SDO MAY render references to types either using the standard XPath representation (see Chapter 9: SDO Path Expression for DataObjects) or as a URI consisting of the type’s URI followed by a ‘#’, followed by the type’s local name. [COR05030101] For instance, a property with type String could be rendered

sdo message