XML Mapping

[Luke Redpath]

I thought I'd start a small thread to give a bit of publicity to the excellent Ruby XML-Mapping library - I've not seen it mentioned often and its quite low down on the RubyForge listings - a shame, as it is a great way of working with XML.

Ruby has a great XML parser in the form of REXML. However, even with the greatest of XML parsers, XML parsing can be incredibly tedious, especially when you are working with the same XML data/schema on a regular basis. XML-Mapping solves this problem by enabling you to create native Ruby objects that map directly to your XML schema. Kind of like ActiveRecord for XML, thought not quite as "automatic" as ActiveRecord - a bit of config is still needed.

Here is a brief example. XML nodes can be mapped to native Ruby objects, including your own custom objects.

#--data.xml
  <person id="001">
    <name>Luke Redpath</name>
    <job>Web Developer</job>
    <address>
      <street>Some Street</street>
      <city>Birmingham</city>
      <postcode>BH1 23X</postcode>
    </address>
  </person>

Now, to create our objects, we simply create the class definitions, include the XML-mapping library, and set out our mappings. Going by the example above, I'd say we have two custom objects, Person and Address, and the rest can be mapped to native types (people is an array, everything else is a string).

require 'xml/mapping'

# forward declarations
class Person; end;
class Address; end;

class Person
  include XML::Mapping

  numeric_node  :id, "@id"
  text_node  :name, "name"
  text_node  :job, "job"
  object_node  :address, "address", :class => Address
end

class Address
  include XML::Mapping
  
  text_node :street, "street"
  text_node :city, "city",
  text_node :postcode, "postcode"
end

# Example usage: 
person = Person.load_from_file("data.xml")
puts person.name
=> "Luke Redpath"
puts person.address.street
=> "Some Street"

For more examples and the api:
http://xml-mapping.rubyforge.org/

It can be installed as a gem:
gem install xml-mapping

Things that could be improved? It would be really cool if it could automatically determine the mappings from an XSD schema file if an XML file had one associated with it. That would make it as awesome as ActiveRecord.

[vgarcia]

Nice. Seems like a quick jumpstart to an RSS transformation library

[Luke Redpath]

Indeed - you could simply write prebuilt schema definitions by extending the XML::Mapping class.

[ezmobius1]

Nice. Seems like a quick jumpstart to an RSS transformation library

Ruby also has an RSS parser built into the standard library fyi:

require 'rss/1.0'
require 'open-uri'

open('http://example.com/rss.xml') do |http|
  response = http.read
  result = RSS::Parser.parse(response, false)
  puts "Channel: #{result.channel.title}"
  result.items.each do |item|
    puts item.title
  end
end 

It can also generate RSS feeds...
Cheers...

[Brak]

What I'd really love to see is an ActiveRecord-esk XML parsing library. One that assumes reasonable defaults and can more or less do all of this "automatically" for you. Simply do something like:

Feed = XMLSuperLib::load(rss.xml)

for person in Feed.person
  puts person.name
end

[bonefry]

Things that could be improved? It would be really cool if it could automatically determine the mappings from an XSD schema file if an XML file had one associated with it. That would make it as awesome as ActiveRecord.

That would be hard and not that usefull, because a schema hardly ever changes, and you ussually write the description once. And parsing a DTD or a XSD schema is hard, the implementation is definitelly slow, and besides, they could contain incomplete information, because you can define tags that accept annonymous tags anytime (in fact it's a common practice to define only really important parts of the XML structure).

[bonefry]

PS: I know you guys are all excited and all about Ruby, and this class is really cool (resembling ActiveRecord), but I will still use a DOM api, because I am familliar with it, and I can migrate the resulting script anytime to PHP,Java and JavaScript with only minor syntax changes. And once you get familliar with it, it's pretty simple to use.

[clintonG]

[QUOTE=Luke Redpath]
<snip />

// May not load...
// For more examples and the api:
// http://xml-mapping.rubyforge.org/

// This page loads directly...
http://rubyforge.org/projects/xml-mapping/

Thanks for bringing this to our attention Luke