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Subject: [ubl-ndrsc] Comments on Elements vs. Attributes Paper - impact onebXML GUIDs
I don't remember whether or not this issue has been decided, but have a few thoughts on it anyway. I have scanned through Gunther's paper and think overall it is a pretty good approach. The X12 XML DR effort is wrestling with the same problem, and has come to a different recommendation (so far anyway) - use elements for application data and attributes only for metadata that won't be passed on to a business application. One reason we decided this was due to the fact that we lacked a clear, deterministic rule for when something should be an element vs. an attribute. Gunther's paper presents just such a rule. However, the mixed use of elements and attributes for business data raises another issue about which I would be interested in hearing some discussion. The ebXML globally unique identifier approach assigns a unique GUID to each piece of business data (currently ebXML core components, but we would hope that business information entities would also have them in the future). I see this as no problem for elements. If I understand correctly we could use the built-in ID attribute, or even use a schema defined attribute like "ebXMLGUID" with a default value. I don't see it as being so easy for attributes, though. Schemas let you use the built-in ID attribute when declaring an attribute, but I wonder how many parsers would be able to access this information at run-time, for example, for doing XSLT transformations based on ebXML GUIDs. Does anyone know if current parsers support retrieving an attribute's schema-defined ID value? Is there any compliance statement in the Schema recommendation regarding this? If retrieving the ID value of an attribute is not supported, I see an argument for only using elements for business data if we really want to support ebXML GUIDs, now or in the future. Cheers, -- Michael C. Rawlins, Rawlins EC Consulting www.rawlinsecconsulting.com
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