Translating from schema to classes

[Dean Roddey]

"I'm looking for a way of representing C/C++ data types in XML.
I've been searching around on the web and found references
to some existing XML that does this, but I haven't found the
document itself.  Can someone give me a hand with this?"

This is related to something I was thinking about the other day. If I'm going
to write some code to manipulate very 'record oriented' XML data, I'd often end
up having a class that represents the records, into which I load the data after
parsing it in. One thing that would greatly ease the job of doing this would be
a program that would take an XML schema, a translation file, and spit out a
class that represents the schema (with getters/setters/serialization/etc...
appropriate for the language and library.) It could also automatically spit out
a method that would (given a DOM fragment of that record type), suck out the
data for that XML record into itself (and vice versa to update the DOM fragment
to represent itself again.

The translation obviously could also be an XML file in which a set of tags are
defined that allow the translation to be customized, for instance a type
mapping tag that says any type foo:int should map to tCIDLib::TInt4 or
something like that.

So, when the XML changes, I can just rerun the translator and spit out the new
class. Any added value I would just provide in a derived class, so that the
underlying data management class can be spit out as required, without losing
any of my code. You could do a translation file for Java, for C++ STL, I could
do one for my CIDLib libraries, etc...

Is anyone doing something like this? Or is this just another dumb idea
(something I'm good at :-) It almost enough trouble to do a translation file
that it wouldn't be worth it unless you had a lot of different XML data records
and/or a lot of different languages to spit out representations for. But the
ability to spit out a method automatically to pull out the data into/outof the
record would be nice in many cases.

Just a thought anyway...

----------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Software Weenie
IBM Center for Java Technology - Silicon Valley
roddey at us.ibm.com

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