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Article: Schema for Web Services – Part I: Basic Datatypes

by Stefan Tilkov on Jan 16, 2009 |

In the first of a series of articles addressing the problems that arise when XML Schema types are mapped to programming language constructs, web services expert Dennis Sosnoski starts at the most basic level, looking at simple data types and the problems they create.

As Dennis writes:

Most web service applications don't work with XML documents directly, instead going through a data binding conversion layer within a web service toolkit. This is convenient for application developers, since it means they can work directly with data structures in their programming language of choice. But the data binding step needs to deal with mismatches between schema data types and structures and programming language data types and structures, and these mismatches can create problems for applications.

He continues to look in detail at XML Schema numeric types, time-related values, and references. For each of these, he outlines the problems and offers some concrete advice on how to handle them.

Check out the complete article.

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Dates by Ben Murphy Posted

Dates by Ben Murphy

Handling of dates and datetime in xmlschema is such a terrible joke. They provide a type for the uncommon case which is a datetime with an optional timezone but don't provide specific types for the common cases which are datetime with a timezone and datetime without a timezone. It's like the writers of the schema have never written an application that has had to deal with dates.