"EAV Set"

["Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@bah.com>]

A thought just popped into my mind (imagine that!) regarding a potential
future registry feature. We have discussed the need to register XML
artifacts at a "granular" level - i.e. elements, attributes, and
datatypes. However, consider a case where an "item" (a field on a form,
for instance) is represented in an XML document not by a single element,
but by a set consisting of:

	- An element
	- An attribute
	- An attribute value

For example, we could have 3 elements in an XML document as follows:

<PriorYearBudgetAmount>9,999.99</PriorYearBudgetAmount>
<CurrentYearBudgetAmount>9,999.99</CurrentYearBudgetAmount>
<NextYearBudgetAmount>9,999.99</NextYearBudgetAmount>

Or, there could be a single repeating element that represents a "budget
amount", with an attribute representing the "type of budget amount", as
follows:

<BudgetAmount timeframe="PriorYear">9,999.99</BudgetAmount>
<BudgetAmount timeframe="CurrentYear">9,999.99</BudgetAmount>
<BudgetAmount timeframe="NextYear">9,999.99</BudgetAmount>

We may called this an "EAV Set" (i.e. "Element/Attribute/Value Set").  I
would like to propose that we consider incorporating the capability to
store and maintain in an ebXML Registry an "EAV Set" that can be
automatically "extracted" from the registry by a user in a single
operation, and placed in an XML document as shown above. This will
alleviate the need for a user to have logic in their XML document
creation program (software product, please pick favorite term) that
determines that proper attribute value to use to represent each item.

Comments and thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe
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