[DCPM] shorthand required

[Neil Williams]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007 12:55:16 +0000
"Aaron Trevena" <aaron.trevena at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Neil,
>
> Your XML creation seems incredibly verbose.

I know.

It wouldn't matter if I could collapse it into 3 lines for all
parameters of all objects, instead of 3 lines per parameter, per object.

Note that this isn't just XML creation, it is XML writing,
SQLite queries and other, as yet unwritten, methods too.

> I would suggest two things :
> 1) try using XML::DOM::BagOfTricks
> (http://search.cpan.org/~teejay/XML-DOM-BagOfTricks-0.05/lib/XML/DOM/BagOfTricks.pm)
> which allows you to do create complex XML tags in a single statement.

Just now, I'd rather stick with XML::Simple and XML::Writer.

> 2) Create a dictionary holding source and destination fieldnames and
> loop through that - a simple array of hashes (to preserve any
> necessary ordering) should be fairly simple then you could do stuff
> like:
>
> $destination_object->$destination_fieldname($source_object->$source_fieldname)
> if ($source_object->$source_fieldname);

I'm not sure if I follow you here. There is no 'destination' object and
I don't see how to convert a struct into this dictionary.

Take a small struct:

struct (ToDo => {
 "todo_note" => '$',         #string   (perl: string)
 "todo_description" => '$',  #string   (perl: string)
 "category" => '$',          #string   (perl: string)
 "guid" => '$',              #guid     (perl: string of hexadecimal characters only)
 "date_due" => '$',          #time     (perl: string passed to time2str)
 "todo_priority" => '$',     #gint32   (perl: integer)
 "todo_complete" => '$',     #gint32   (perl: integer)
 "todo_length" => '$',       #gint32   (perl: integer)
});


I get as far as:
my @todos = ('todo_note' => 'string',
	'todo_description' => 'string',
	'category' => 'string',
	'guid' => 'guid',
	'date_due' => 'time',
	'todo_priority' => 'gint32',
	'todo_complete' => 'gint32',
	'todo_length' => 'gint32');

But I'm not at all sure that I follow how to get to:

> $destination_object->$destination_fieldname($source_object->$source_fieldname)
> if ($source_object->$source_fieldname);

How does that cope with objects that have different numbers of
different types of parameters, all with different names? How is
the 'dictionary' created and populated?

I've already got a hash of array references where the arrays contain
instances of the structs containing the data.

--


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/devoncornwall-pm/attachments/20070217/1d323c5f/attachment.bin