[fpc-devel] fpXMLXSDExport questions and possible bugs/issue(s)

[Walter Prins]

Hello,

As background: I'm a Delphi developer, though I've been aware of FPC
and Lazarus for a long time.  Recently I ran into a situation where I
needed to generate an XML format that could be ready by a third party
application, and it turned out that the ADO.Net XML format might be
suitable. After a bit of searching I located the FreePascal
fpXMLXSDExport module, which contains a class that claimed it could
write this format and which sounded perfect if it would work.
I thus proceeded to convert the code to compile/run under Delphi (XE.)
 This process was surprisingly easy and the code needed only a couple
of small adjustments to initially compile.

I did run into a couple of issues/problems getting it running
correctly, related to Delphi and types.  These I eventually fixed,
they are relatively minor and the code should still work on FPC.  (not
tested yet.)

More problematic: I ran into issues with the format of XML produced by
the class, which wasn't in fact compatible with ADO.NET for the data I
tested -- When I initially tried to read a file output via an app
(using Microsoft .Net mscorlib), it failed with "invalid string
format" errors.

I eventually managed to track down the source of this problem, which
was basically that null values was being output with empty nodes into
the XML file (e.g. <tag></tag>). This is apparently not avlid and
instead one should just leave them out entirely.  I thus subsequently
found the offending code in the FPC class and fixed it output XML that
is correctly read by mscorlib

So, consequently I have several questions:

1) Do you care about Delphi compatibility at all? (E.g. would you be
interested in the tweaks I made to to the code to enable Delphi to
compile it, providing it doesn't break FPC?)

2) Do you care about the changes I made to ensure correctness when
used with Delphi?  (Again obviously only if this doesn't cause any
issues for FPC?)

3) Are you interested in the fixes for the ADO.NET exporter class in
FPC library?  As it stands this class doesn't in fact generate ADONET
compatible XML (meaning, at least on my PC the XML it outputs isn't
readable by ADO.Net mscorlib) and is effectively therefore broken.

4) Finally there's several other loose ends I noticed in the code --
no way to set TableName, no way to set Dataset (collection) Name, no
way to add more tables into the dataset.  (In my use case this would
be useful.)  I might look into these enhancements and will submit
patches if there's interest.

I'm interested in submitting patches for some/all of the above points
if there's any interest. If so, I'll try ensure I test the changes
using FPC etc before submitting etc.

Assuming there's interest, what would be the preferred way to proceed?

Walter Prins