[fpc-pascal] XML-XSD export: importer & how to test

Reinier Olislagers reinierolislagers at gmail.com
Thu Jul 28 16:28:48 CEST 2011


On 28-7-2011 15:13, Reinier Olislagers wrote:
> On 28-7-2011 14:36, Ludo Brands wrote:
> 
> I'll get to the issues some time after the test framework improvements.
> 
> If you prefer to, please feel free to directly enter the issues:
> https://bitbucket.org/reiniero/fpc_laz_patch_playground/issues/new
> 
> In addition, I could also give you write access to the bitbucket
> mercurial repository...
> 
> Regards,
> Reinier

Hi Ludo, (and the rest)

Regarding the XML XSD export: I'm taking it a bit more easy and am
focussing on the test set first, then use the existing export code to
generate some output (even if it's wrong) that we can test further
output on.
Then we can compare output (e.g. Clientdataset fixes) a bit more easier
with a diff tool.

Questions/remarks:
1. Do you know a free GUI diff tool for XML that shows only the changes
in contents and nodes, not whitespaces, comments etc? Couldn't find any,
except some ancient IBM java app I couldn't get running (probably user
error ;)

2. Ludo, or anyone else, if you want to improve the export code, please
go ahead as I'm not working on it for the next couple of days.
You could send me the results when you're done; I'll add it to the new
tests and upload it as a patch. (Or upload it yourself of course ;)
I suspect I'll be looking at the export code again after the weekend.

3. Regarding the tests: I thought about better ways of testing the
exports. The only fairly easy way I see is testing with more databases
(such as mysql which you were doing), maybe by adapting the existing
fcl-db test framework. Haven't ever run that though, but I can learn ;)

Another solution would be to verify the xml output, but then you're
basically writing an importer for the export format ;)
Could be worthwile in the case of Delphi Clientdataset though...

Any thoughts on how to improve the tests?

4. Would it actually make sense to start an importer project that
imports e.g. clientdataset, csv, into a dataset? Is there already
something like that?

5. I briefly thought about including OpenOffice Calc (ODT) format
exporting but that seems a bit overkill as there already is a CSV export
format. Any thoughts on new formats - apart from Atom ;) ?

Thanks,
Reinier



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