Grouper Developers Forum

[Tom Zeller <>]

> GW Brown, Information Systems and Computing wrote:
>>
>> --On 21 January 2010 09:28 -0600 Tom Barton 
>> <>
>>  wrote:
>>
>>> Chris Hyzer wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Alternatively, would it make sense to include an attribute of
>>>>> uuid-bearing child elements that contain the name of the object being
>>>>> referenced? Eg,
>>>>
>>>> Well, if it were easy, I might say yes.  But I didn't want to mess
>>>> with the default Xstream serialization.  Plus, I also didn't want
>>>> people to rely on this either i.e. start using it for something,
>>>> since the xml export isn't for provisioning, right?  :)
>>>
>>> Understood. It's just that my sanity-checker fires up when I see us
>>> mapping structured data into comments.
>>>
>>> Gary, who were you anticipating would use those comments, humans or
>>> automatons?
>>
>> My first concern is being able to understand/troubleshoot the data without
>> having to lookup all those uuids. Comments would not be very friendly for
>> machine parsing but we are only expecting Grouper to parse the file and it
>> doesn't need the data here.
>>
>> I would suggest that we go with comments for now and wait and see if
>> anyone requests additional attributes / tags.
>
> I have no problem with this.
>
> Tom

Could the comments be written as valid xml nodes, rather than <!--
-->, so that the same parser used to read the machine data could read
the comments as well ? I'm thinking that's easy enough to do in code
and may be easier for folks to read using tools other than their eyes.
I do realize we don't want to encourage using those comments for
"real" things, though.

TomZ