Comments on: XML to VO – as easy as apple pie!? (demo included)

By: Tiago Almeida

Tiago Almeida — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:25:08 +0000

Thanks for the example :)
We’re using this to export/import data for a simple app.
Cool stuff!

By: Bruno Barauskas

Bruno Barauskas — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 02:35:14 +0000

Man, you saved my life!!!! You and Mr. Dominic De Lorenzo. I catch up my webservice WSDL, create an Schema object with his types and the magic was done, I also did the encoding process too and works ok, beacuse I had to send an request message with an complex type inside.

Just plus one information:
To get the Flex XML classes of mx.rpc.xml.*, go to /x.x.x/frameworks/projects/rpc/src

I recomend other links very interesting, to understang WSDL and XML Schema Hierarchy:

http://www.predic8.com/wsdl-reading.htm – About WSDL structure by Thomas Bayer
http://oreilly.com/catalog/webservess/chapter/ch06.html – About webservice structure By O’Reilly
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/08/22/easyschema.html – This makes me understand the complex types in a better approach By Donald Smith
http://www.w3schools.com/schema/schema_schema.asp – Well, the basis By W3C

Thank you again!!!!!!!!

By: Val

Val — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 03:21:18 +0000

Very useful. How would you go about parsing an xml attribute to a vo variable?

By: Aron

Aron — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:44:31 +0000

Thanks Nav for letting us know. I just fixed that.

It’s a shame that it stand there for so long, without anyone noticing it… ;)

By: Nav

Nav — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:18:46 +0000

The code works only by replacing the lines 88-89 with the following:
schemaTypeRegistry.registerClass(new QName(schema.targetNamespace.uri, “group”), GroupVo);
schemaTypeRegistry.registerClass(new QName(schema.targetNamespace.uri, “field”), FieldVo);

XML element names and VO names are incorrect. Except for this minor typo, your code works great!!

By: Aron

Aron — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:23:00 +0000

Hi Oliver, thanks for the info. I just tested that with the example xml above and it seams that the script does not work with nested vo’s.

In the example above, the XMLDecoder decodes the nested vo types GroupVo and FieldVo like a charm.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:39:58 +0000

Addendum: point taken about the advantages of using a schema though.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:38:32 +0000

That looks interesting… but the same result can be achieved without defining the schema at all using the class detailed here:

http://dispatchevent.org/roger/instant-model-binding-with-reflection/

By: Aron

Aron — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:54:38 +0000

Sure, if you’re fine with straight XML, why decode / parse in the first place? However, some developers (us for instance ;) ) prefer working with VO’s.

The schema stuff centralize the definition of your XML. When decoding the XML inside the VO (we also did this in the past) you might end up with lots of classes to change, when there is a change in the XML schema.

By: Mark Lapasa

Mark Lapasa — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:20:39 +0000

Very interesting post. Question, why not just pass around raw XML and e4x it what you need. It looks like you have to go through hoops to define the schema in the first place just so you have a method of parsing it? Another method would be to have a setter on a VO to take in XML and then have getters access the paths.

My dream solution would be define the entity on the sever-side and in flex, it would just code-complete a reference to that entity’s interface with the least amount of work as possible.