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Thursday, January 13, 2011

Variables and Schemas in Portlet Factory

Anyone who has played with portlet factory will quickly learn that it depends heavily on xml defined by a schema. Putting some thought into this I realized that a schema is really a way to define a type and a WPF variable is an instance of that type. For example there is a close correlation between a java type definition such as:

public class Contact{
   public String name;
   public String phone;
}
...
public class Data{
   public List<Contact> dsixe;
}

and an xml representation of the same information as

<dsixe>
    <contact>
        <name/>
        <phone/>
    </contact>
</dsixe>

with a schema that looks like this

<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:dsixe="http://dsixe.com/contact" targetNamespace="http://dsixe.com/contact">
   <xsd:element name="dsixe">
      <xsd:complexType>
         <xsd:sequence>
            <xsd:element ref="dsixe:contact" minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
         </xsd:sequence>
      </xsd:complexType>
   </xsd:element>
   <xsd:element name="contact">
      <xsd:complexType>
         <xsd:sequence>
            <xsd:element ref="dsixe:name" minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" />
            <xsd:element ref="dsixe:phone" minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" />
         </xsd:sequence>
      </xsd:complexType>
   </xsd:element>
   <xsd:element name="name" type="xsd:string" />
   <xsd:element name="phone" type="xsd:string" />
</xsd:schema>

Combining the variable builder with the schema builder

Portlet factory provides separate builders to define a schema and a variable, but sometimes it would be nice to combine both into one when I need a quick and dirty variable and I don't want to create a standalone schema file. If I know what my xml structure looks like then I want WPF to just figure out what the schema is based on some sample data in one motion.
To that end I created a custom builder that combines elements from the variable builder with those of a schema builder:


The builder creates a schema in the model with a suffix _xsd and a variable with a suffix _var:

The builder can be downloaded and installed as a WPF package under Optional Libraries feature set.
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