Re: [xml] Pointers in a struct _xmlNode for entities

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 02:46:02PM +0000, Dave Malcolm wrote:
> I have a question about the internal representation of entities in a
> tree built by libxml2.
>
> Assuming I've got entity substitution turned off, am I right in thinking
> the following?
> (i) below my XML_DTD_NODE I will have various XML_ENTITY_DECL nodes,
> with the declaration as "children", and these children having a "parent"
> pointer back to the XML_ENTITY_DECL node.

  yes, 
The DTD also have an entity hash table allowing quick lookup
without scanning the full DTD.

> (ii) within the body of the document, I will have XML_ENTITY_REF_NODE
> nodes of which the "children" and "last" pointers will point to the
> first and last children of the XML_ENTITY_DECL node.

   yes

> (iii) hence, for the XML_ENTITY_REF_NODE nodes, the relation
> (node->children->parent != node) holds.

  in general yes

> Or have I misunderstood?  Thanks in advance! (I'm about to write some
> complex GUI code that allows users to edit entities in-place and have
> all references auto-update visually, and I want to be sure of the
> implementation details)

  That's the expected handling, the goal was to be able to have a
single tree structure for all entities refernces, specifically for
editing purposes. The big bad drawback is entities with namespaces
where the namespace prefix is not defined within the entity like
  "<foo:bar/>"
then the meaning of foo becomes contextual and this can lead to a
big bad mess...

Daniel
-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network https://rhn.redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/