Tin Man Design Question 2 - More detail

[David_Marston@lotus.com]

Here is one of the issues identified in my message titled "Test Case
Markup & Cataloging, Tin Man edition" that I sent to this list on
12/1/2000:
2. How to represent the file hierarchy in Title, Identifier, Source

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:
This is an issue for the software that would be reading the
catalog data and attempting to create file paths. The
question is whether to require the harness to concatenate
strings (and thus know the separator character). One approach
says that Identifier, the element that contains whatever path
there is, is complete: it begins with Title (highest level
directory of this submitter's tests) and goes all the way
down to Source (name of this test case). Another approach is
to have Identifier only contain the part between Title and
Source, avoiding duplication of the name.

ADDITIONAL DISCUSSION:
Different files in a test suite could be at different depths in a
directory tree structure. Other parts of the design say that each test
suite submitted shall be encompassed in one directory tree, whose name is
the Title element. Thus, we have trees named Lotus, NIST, Saxon, etc.
that go into the assembly process. The Source element identifies an
individual test case. Identifier must be sufficient to identify the full
path. For example, the Lotus suite has a test case named LRE01 that is in
the lre directory. The full path "Lotus/lre/LRE01" could be what the
Identifier element contains, or it could be just the middle "/lre/" or
even "lre".

I don't think we can avoid "/" separators entirely. I suggest that we
just look at whether we want to require concatenation...
FullPath = conact(Title, Identifier, Source)
and thereby have no duplicate data in the catalog, or to have the full
path in the identifier and avoid concatenation but require duplication
of data (with its attendant ability to get out of sync). Once the full
path is in hand, one can change the / separators to \ for DOS/Windows or
to : for the Mac.

Also note that the concatenation discussion above is separate from
another bit of concatenation that I anticipate will be needed: putting
a file suffix on the "full" path string. That is, take the path
Lotus/lre/LRE01 and append ".xml" and ".xsl" to get the two inputs to
the test case. Tin Man introduces the variations on this idea, too.

If you think that I have excluded a possibility for Question 2 that is
worthy of voting, please send a description to the list before the 13th.
.................David Marston