Re: [provision] XPath expressions.

[Darran Rolls <Darran.Rolls@Sun.COM>]

Gary

Can you elaberate on the use of "user", is this tied only to a specific 
type (so to speak) or does this just mean "all the schema object 
instances on the target"?.  If the latter, would "//object" be better?

Darran

Gary P Cole wrote:

> The short-form of XPATH (and what most of us usually see) is actually 
> the "abbreviated syntax" (http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#path-abbrev) for 
> a location path.  Some applications call these "canonical" XPath 
> expressions.
> - each step assumes the "child" axis by default
> - "@" is short for "attribute:"
>
> - "//" is short for "/descendant-or-self::node()/"
> - "." is short for self::node()
> - ".." is short for parent:node()
>
> The long-form of XPath (the general form) is what some call an 
> "arbitrary XPath expression".  These expressions can be arbitrarily 
> complex and may combine any number of axes.
>
> 1) Some applications support only Canonical XPath expressions, and I 
> think that is all that SPMLv2 should require a provider to support.  
> Gerry Woods mentioned the burden of complexity that we impose if we 
> require a provider to support the general form of XPath expressions.
>
> 2) I think we should treat each Target as a document root that 
> (directly or indirectly) contains all other objects as nodes.  So, for 
> example, "/user" would select all user objects directly contained by 
> the target.  The XPath expression "//user" would select all user 
> objects on a target, no matter which container was their parent.
>
> 3) Should we further restrict the forms of XPath expressions that an 
> SPMLv2 provider must support?
>
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