David Abrahams wrote:
on Fri Jul 06 2007, Stefan Seefeld <seefeld-AT-sympatico.ca> wrote:
over the last couple of years we have discussed possible XML APIs for inclusion into boost. As I already had an early prototype for such an API, I kept evolving it, based on feedback from those discussions. A couple of weeks ago I actually checked it into the sandbox (http://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/browser/sandbox/xml). Today, I adjusted the source layout to conform to the sandbox layout we agreed on, including a boost.build - based build-system.
I would appreciate if anybody interested into a future boost.xml submission would have a look, provide feedback, or even get involved into the (ongoing) development.
Okay, this is going to sound very opinionated:
I find XML horrible to read
Agreed; I think it's just sufficiently good that a better alternative would fail.
however I find most of the procedural code I've seen for manipulating it even more horrible.
You've seen my code, haven't you :-)
I would like to see a more declarative syntax for much of this stuff.
I prefer to read any constant fragments from files or from literal strings, which is about as declarative as you can get.
root.push_front( tag("articleinfo")[ title ? (comment("This title was moved"), title) : NULL , tag("author")[ tag("firstname")["Joe"], tag("surname")["Random"] ] ] )
How close can we get to that using Boost.Assign, if the element class is a model of a suitable container? But I think that using subclasses is the key to making this sort of code easier on the eye: struct firstname: public element { firstname(n): element("firstname",n) {}; }; etc. articleinfo ai; if (title) ai.push_back(comment("This title was moved")); author a; a.push_back(firstname("Joe")); a.push_back(surname("Random")); ai.push_back(a); root.push_back(ai); Just adding some non-standard indentation to that makes it almost as clear as I need. You don't need the {}, but it keeps your editor's auto-indent happy: articleinfo ai; { if (title) ai.push_back(comment("This title was moved")); author a; { a.push_back(firstname("Joe")); a.push_back(surname("Random")); ai.push_back(a); } root.push_back(ai); } You can also reduce the declare-populate-add to delcare-populate if you pass the parent to the sub-elements' constructors: articleinfo ai(root); { if (title) comment(ai,"This title was moved"); author a(ai); { firstname(a,"Joe"); surname(a,"Random"); } } Of course there is a question of the lifespan of these apparently-temporary objects to resolve. Anyway, I think that nice-looking XML-generating code can be possible without "resorting to" operator overloading. Regards, Phil.