Re: [xml] Allocating entities dynamically, without pre-existing DTD while using SAX

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 12:58:13AM +0100, Marek Habersack wrote:
> I need to make it possible for the document parser to dynamically define
> entities based on the user's input (in shape of an RXML - a Caudium's
> extendable markup language). I cannot pre-define a DTD because most of the
> entities defined by the webserver have values assigned on a per-request
> basis and they can change at any time the document is parsed/reparsed. I'm

  Hum, this is a bad start. Basically an XML document without a DOCTYPE
and using unknown entities is not well-formed. So it seems the basic
choice of using entities for "variables" is not a a really good one :-\

> using the SAX interface since a) the server must be able to parse an
> arbitrary number of documents of unknown size, b) the xmlreader doesn't seem
> to be able to handle dynamic allocation/definition of entities at all. So
> far, I see three ways of doing what I want, they are:
> 
>  1. use the getEntity() handler in the handler struct and allocate the
>     entities there by calling xmlAddDocEntity or xmlAddDtdEntity. 

  it looks like the solution which will "make it work" the most easilly
BUT you must be aware that the markup templates won't be XML then !

>  2. inject the entity DTD definitions into the document's preamble just
>     before parsing it.

   Ugly, really ... worse of both worlds.

>  3. add an external reference to the DTD that points back to the site
>     handled by our server and read the DTD from there. The DTD would be
>     generated dynamically by the server.

  this is actually the cleanest solution because your templates are
well formed XML now ! But this may cost a bit more at run-time I agree.

>   Those are the three scenarios I came up with, not knowing XML2 good enough
> to find any other way out of the problem. My favorite scenario is, of
> course, #1 -- but the question is whether it's possible to define the
> entities in such way as described? Is it safe for me to muck with xmlEntity
> directly and allocate and populate the structure by hand without calling
> down to the XML2 API? I would love to get rid of our current XML parser we
> are using since XML2 is so much faster, so much more featured that it is,
> IMO, the only viable alternative to what we have now. Any help will be
> greately appreciated.

  You can bypass the APIs and use the structures directly. Since I expose
them it's possible, but this will require some work to make sure it's
stable and doesn't leak. This sounds possble, but this will probably
require a bit of debugging.

Daniel

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