Monday 6 February 2012

XML Data Binding - Part 1: Why do we need it?

Your application uses some XML parsing tool (Xerces, libxml, TinyXML, TinyXML++, RapidXml, PugiXML,...) in order to load XML file into a document object, then you traverse through a DOM tree structure, look for nodes, their children, search their attributes so can modify its content (add, modify or delete elements or attributes)...and all this usually requires lots of loops and string comparisons which creates huge, hard to maintain code. Wouldn't be better if you could load XML document into some object in memory which attributes match elements in your XML? You would then be dealing with (C++) objects instead of the complex DOM tree which is much quicker, easier, type safe and less error prone.

Let's say we have some XML that keeps track of the state of the local library. To keep model simple, we can say that library comprises books and staff. Each book has its title, author and ISBN number. Each member of the staff, librarian, has a name. XML document could look like this:

library.xml


We can map each class of nodes into a C++ class where class attributes are node's attributes and its children; siblings are stored in a vector. We need a single instance of the class which represents a root node. Its constructor loads XML document from a file on disk and its destructor saves (eventually modified) XML document back to the file. Our class model and use case might look like this:

main.cpp:



XML document was loaded into object, modified by adding a new book and saved back into the file in just three lines of code! Awesome! But this code is unfinished and actually doesn't work properly in the real life as I omitted the hardest bit: loading and parsing XML in library's constructor and serializing/marshalling object back to the file in the destructor. All I wanted to show was how quick and easy is to manipulate XMLs when representing them through objects - a concept which is known as XML Data Binding.

Another problem steams from the fact that for each new XML we would need to write completely new classes - doing this manually is a no way to go but luckily there are tools that do this automatically. They compile XML schema (a document which specifies XML document itself) into a set of classes, following precise rules of mapping XML into objects (Object/XML Mapping or O/X Mapping). In next two articles I will show how to use gSOAP and CodeSynthesis XSD for this.

Links and References:
XML Data Binding Tools

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Data binding is not limited to between controls, you can also bind to XML data, current Data Context, Binding Group Name, and Relative Source.
http://www.dapfor.com/en/net-suite/net-grid/features/performance