RE: [cgmo-webcgm] regex in 'name' and 'apsid' addressing

["Forrest Carpenter" <forrest@sdicgm.com>]

All,

At the request of our customers, we have added an SDI specific method to
control the redraw after an attribute change. They needed to apply different
attribute changes to many different apps without a redraw for each change.
The use of regex would be helpful, but I think we also need something like
Style/Transform node list where a different style or transform could we
applied to individual nodes in a node list without a redraw for each
attribute change. This will become more important when a transform is added
to the DOM.

Regards,
Forrest  

-----Original Message-----
From: Lofton Henderson [mailto:lofton@rockynet.com] 
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2007 6:26 PM
To: cgmo-webcgm@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: [cgmo-webcgm] regex in 'name' and 'apsid' addressing

 From the last telecon...

At 08:07 PM 9/5/2007 +0000, david.w.cruikshank@boeing.com wrote:
>Download 
>Document: 
>http://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/cgmo-webcgm/download.php/25198
/20070905_WebCGM_TC_Telecon_minutes_r1.pdf 
>

We were talking about generalizing object addressing, by allowing regular 
expressions (regex) in 'apsid' and in the 'name' ApsAttr.  Here is a quote 
from the minutes...

>Dieter also suggested that we could expand the getAppStructureByName and
>getAppStructureById methods to include regular expression pattern matching 
>on the name APS
>attribute. An example would be to access all switches who's name begin 
>with "A" ("A*") so that
>they could all be turned off. He also implied that doing this could 
>improve performance if we
>could act on a nodelist to set attributes instead of individually setting 
>them.
>Is there vendor commitment?
>In general, it appeared that the vendors would implement this as a vendor 
>specific interface and
>not as a standardized method. Dieter offered to document his proposal for 
>expansion of the
>getAppStructurebyName and get AppStructureById methods.
>Action / Responsible / Due
>White paper describing
>applying regular expressions
>to the name APS attribute for
>searching / Dieter / 12 Sep 2007

In general, I think it is a potentially useful and interesting extension 
for 2.1.  I do have some questions and thoughts about its scope and nature.

First question, about scope, and this really applies to a lot of 2.1 stuff 
that we're talking about:  in which of three possible functional areas 
should the feature be defined and usable in some form?

1.) DOM interface;
2.) In the fragment definition:  In a WebCGM instance itself (i.e., should 
regex be allowed in 'apsid' and in 'name' ApsAttr in WebCGM instances), and 
in fragments for example in external XHTML content that address into a
WebCGM.
3.) In XCF.

Second question:  Is there an issue with the char-repertoire of 'name' [1], 
that it allows meta-characters that are significant to regex to appear 
within names?  (By the way, we have already reserved the 1-character name 
"*", as it appears in the special-form fragment "id(*,clearHighlight)" -- 
fortunately, that is regex-compatible for an expanded regex capability.)

[1] 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-webcgm20-20070130/WebCGM20-IC.html#webcgm_3_1_
1_3

I don't know the answer to this question yet.  I suspect that we could come 
up with a scheme that uses meta-character escaping (typically "\" in regex, 
if I recall), but it will need some careful definition.  It's much easier 
for 'apsid', which has a much more restricted character repertoire [2].

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-common-syn

It is also possible that, instead of just trying to drop regex syntax into 
the current fragment definition, we could expand the fragment syntax by 
adding new keywords and structure, e.g.,

name( regex(myNameWithRegexStuff), myObjBehavior).

(It potential creates backward-compatibility clash, but on the other hand 
there probably isn't much content out there where someone has built an 
object name that is framed with "regex(....stuff....)").

All for now,
-Lofton.