Simple one-pass w3c XML schema simple type parsing, validation, and deserialization system

Abstract

A method for validating simple type data in XML documents, the method comprising: identifying data via an Extensible Markup Language (XML); developing schema for specifying formal data typing and validation of element content in terms of data types; generating a parser for parsing the collection of elements in a first stage where the schema is read and modeled in terms of abstract schema components, a second stage where the schema is augmented with a set of calculated schema components and properties used to drive code generation, and a third stage where the schema is traversed to generate a validation code for each of the collection of elements, and generate simple type validator modules which perform well-formedness checking the data; validating the simple type data against specific type information; and converting the data to datatype-specific form, all in a single pass.

Description

TRADEMARKS[0001]IBM® is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, N.Y., U.S.A. Other names used herein may be registered trademarks, trademarks or product names of International Business Machines Corporation or other companies.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Field of the Invention[0003]This invention relates to XML parsers, and particularly to a method for performing simple-type well-formedness checking, validation, and datatype conversion in one single pass.[0004]2. Description of Background[0005]XML (Extensible Markup Language) has begun to work its way into the business computing infrastructure and underlying protocols such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web services. In the performance-critical setting of business computing, however, the flexibility of XML becomes a liability due to the potentially significant performance penalty. XML processing is conceptually a multitiered task, an attribute it inherits from the multipl...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012]As a result of the summarized invention, technically we have achieved a solution that performs well-formedness checkin...

Problems solved by technology

In the performance-critical setting of business computing, however, the flexibility of XML becomes a liability due to the potentially significant performance penalty.

Although traditional grammar-based parser generation techniques could be applied to the XML Schema grammar, the expressiveness of XML Schema does not lend itself well to the generic intermediate representations associated with these approaches.

However, generic XML parsers, by performing tasks in separate passes, degrade performance of the overall application.

When deserialization of the data into datatype-specific objects is also needed, typical applications reparse the input data to perform the conversion, thus resulting in poor performance.

These extra passes take much time and thus considerably slow down the parse processing.

Traditional XML parsers are not capable of performing all necessary tasks in a single pass.

Images