Re: [provision] XPath expressions.

[Gary P Cole <Gary.P.Cole@Sun.COM>]

Sorry; I chose a poor example.  To stay with the examples of 
supportedSchemaEntities in the spec draft, I'd have said:
    "//Person" selects all Person instances on the target
    "/Person" selects all Person instances with the target as direct parent
    "//Group" selects all Group instances on the target
    "/Group" selects all Group instances with the target as direct parent

Darran Rolls wrote:

> Gary
>
> Can you elaborate 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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>>
>>
>
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