Issue - 268 - Support for multiple children within literal variant

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Issue - 268 - Support for multiple children within literal variant

Status: received
Date added: 21 Apr 2006
Date submitted: 20 April 2006
Submitter: Mark Ford
Description: The literal variant of the copy operation currently allows support for multiple child elements like so: 
<copy> 
  <from> 
    <literal xmlns:foo="http://example.com"> 
      <foo:one/> 
      <foo:two/> 
      <foo:three/> 
    </literal> 
  </from> 
... 
</copy> 
The issue is that this <literal> will always generate a bpel:selectionFailure when used since it results in multiple EII's (see Section 8.4.1 3rd paragraph)

I discussed this with Danny and Alex briefly during the Stuttgart face to face and the only scenario offered was that an extensibleAssign or some other extension activity would be able to handle the multiple children without an exception. Even with this scenario, I don't see why we should provide support for multiple children when it cannot be used by the core language. If an extensibleAssign wants to provide this behavior then perhaps it could also provide its own version of a <literal>.
Submitter's proposal: I propose that we drop support for multiple child elements within a literal due to this issue. The value of the literal should be restricted to a single EII or a single TII or empty. I also propose adding a statement that this MUST be caught during static analysis.
Changes: 21 Apr 2006 - new issue

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