OpenSAML user discussion

["Scott Cantor" <>]

> Yeah, I don't think there's any way it can be, it's not applicable.
> Nillable is a property of an element, not a type.  xs:anyType is the
> ur-type, but a type nonetheless.

Yeah, I realize that now. And wow, that's just...wow. Complete stupidity.
 
> In Java, with the default config, a bare AttributeValue would be an
> XSAny instance.

That's what I thought. In my case, I have marker subclasses for any elements
or types that are "anyType", and they get used by default, which allows for
a distinction between wildcard elements that are nillable and those that
aren't.

What I'm not doing correctly and may punt on is preserving xsi:nil="false"
for cases that aren't nillable. That seems incredibly stupid to do, but it's
legal, I assume (haven't tried it). But I could handle that as I do
schemaLocation and such by preserving it via XMLObject without exposing it.

> One aspect of this that's a little pesky is that we kind of fudge the
> distinction between elements and types.   Without resurrecting the whole
> "are we type-oriented or element-oriented" discussion: with no
> exceptions that I can think of, our interfaces and impls really
> represent the content model defined by a type.

Mine are not, and I think that's the difference. When I handle types, that's
the weird/edge case. Everything else I have is element-based.
 
-- Scott