Axis2/C Codegen new features

Well, I m right now looking in to fixing a very basic bug in the axis2/c codegen templates. I m wonder how it ran so much time without fixing this, Anyway thanks for the questions in the mailing list, I thought I should spend sometime on this in this weekend!!! Yea I remember I should prepare to do a RC on wsf/ruby next moday:).

The bug is, the tool is never handling nillable elements and optional attributes. And even worse! in serializing you can never generate a nil element, the code will set some default value at wherever you didn’t specify a value.

The fix is very simple, At deserializing, we can always check whether the element is nillable from the schema, if so at runtime, we check whether the wanted element is having the attribute xsi:type=’nil’. or simply just first child is NULL.

At serializing, we may keep another variable to track each inner element is valid or not. If a non-nillable element is not valid we can complain.

Next thing what are the functions we should provide to deal with nil things. For an example if we take the following schema component,

<xs:element name=”Book”>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name=”Title” type=”xs:string”/>
<xs:element maxOccurs=”unbounded” name=”Authors” type=”xs:string”/>
<xs:element name=”Publisher” nillable=”true” type=”xs:string”/>
<xs:element name=”Price” nillable=”true” type=”xs:int”/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>

Here the function available to set/get publisher would be,

adb_Book_set_Publisher(.., axis2_char_t *publisher)

axis2_char_t* adb_Book_get_Publisher(..)

So whenever publisher need to be kept nil, you can pass NULL to the set_publisher function.

But this won’t work when it come to an int. So there will be additional two functions to set and get the nil value associated with the price.

adb_Book_set_Price(.., int price)

int adb_Book_get_Price(..)

adb_Book_set_Price_nil()

axis2_bool_t adb_Book_is_Price_nil(..)

I think for consistancy we should have set_nil and is nil for all the nillable properties (I m not sure should we need to have this for even non-nillables)

And how if the Publisher inner element is changed to something like this,

<xs:element maxOccurs=”unbounded” name=”Publishers” nillable=”true” type=”xs:string”/>

Then the the functions to be added will be,

adb_Book_add_Publishers_nil()

axis2_bool_t adb_Book_is_Publishers_nil_at(..)

Whenever adb_Book_set_Publishers_at is available, adb_Book_is_Publishers_nil_at will also be available hopefully.

Is this looks like a mess?, but unfortunately it is how this should be changed.

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