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<!DOCTYPE s1 SYSTEM "sbk:/style/dtd/document.dtd">
<s1 title="Programming Guide">
<anchor name="Macro"/>
<s2 title="Version Macro">
<p>&XercesCName; defines a numeric preprocessor macro, _XERCES_VERSION, for users to
introduce into their code to perform conditional compilation where the
version of &XercesCName; is detected in order to enable or disable version
specific capabilities. For example,
</p>
<source>
#if _XERCES_VERSION >= 30102
// Code specific to Xerces-C++ version 3.1.2 and later.
#else
// Old code.
#endif
</source>
<p>The minor and revision (patch level) numbers have two digits of resolution
which means that '1' becomes '01' and '2' becomes '02' in this example.
</p>
<p>There are also other string macros or constants to represent the Xerces-C++ version.
Please refer to the <code>xercesc/util/XercesVersion.hpp</code> header for details.
</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="Schema"/>
<s2 title="Schema Support">
<p>&XercesCName; contains an implementation of the W3C XML Schema
Language. See the <jump href="schema-&XercesC3Series;.html">XML Schema Support</jump> page for details.
</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="Progressive"/>
<s2 title="Progressive Parsing">
<p>In addition to using the <code>parse()</code> method to parse an XML File.
You can use the other two parsing methods, <code>parseFirst()</code> and <code>parseNext()</code>
to do the so called progressive parsing. This way you don't
have to depend on throwing an exception to terminate the
parsing operation.
</p>
<p>
Calling <code>parseFirst()</code> will cause the DTD (both internal and
external subsets), and any pre-content, i.e. everything up to
but not including the root element, to be parsed. Subsequent calls to
<code>parseNext()</code> will cause one more pieces of markup to be parsed,
and propagated from the core scanning code to the parser (and
hence either on to you if using SAX/SAX2 or into the DOM tree if
using DOM).
</p>
<p>
You can quit the parse any time by just not
calling <code>parseNext()</code> anymore and breaking out of the loop. When
you call <code>parseNext()</code> and the end of the root element is the
next piece of markup, the parser will continue on to the end
of the file and return false, to let you know that the parse
is done. So a typical progressive parse loop will look like
this:</p>
<source>// Create a progressive scan token
XMLPScanToken token;
if (!parser.parseFirst(xmlFile, token))
{
cerr &lt;&lt; "scanFirst() failed\n" &lt;&lt; endl;
return 1;
}
//
// We started ok, so lets call scanNext()
// until we find what we want or hit the end.
//
bool gotMore = true;
while (gotMore &amp;&amp; !handler.getDone())
gotMore = parser.parseNext(token);</source>
<p>In this case, our event handler object (named 'handler')
is watching for some criteria and will
return a status from its <code>getDone()</code> method. Since
the handler
sees the SAX events coming out of the SAXParser, it can tell
when it finds what it wants. So we loop until we get no more
data or our handler indicates that it saw what it wanted to
see.</p>
<p>When doing non-progressive parses, the parser can easily
know when the parse is complete and insure that any used
resources are cleaned up. Even in the case of a fatal parsing
error, it can clean up all per-parse resources. However, when
progressive parsing is done, the client code doing the parse
loop might choose to stop the parse before the end of the
primary file is reached. In such cases, the parser will not
know that the parse has ended, so any resources will not be
reclaimed until the parser is destroyed or another parse is started.</p>
<p>This might not seem like such a bad thing; however, in this case,
the files and sockets which were opened in order to parse the
referenced XML entities will remain open. This could cause
serious problems. Therefore, you should destroy the parser instance
in such cases, or restart another parse immediately. In a future
release, a reset method will be provided to do this more cleanly.</p>
<p>Also note that you must create a scan token and pass it
back in on each call. This insures that things don't get done
out of sequence. When you call <code>parseFirst()</code> or
<code>parse()</code>, any
previous scan tokens are invalidated and will cause an error
if used again. This prevents incorrect mixed use of the two
different parsing schemes or incorrect calls to
<code>parseNext()</code>.</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="GrammarCache"/>
<s2 title="Pre-parsing Grammar and Grammar Caching">
<p>&XercesCName; provides a function to pre-parse the grammar so that users
can check for any syntax error before using the grammar. Users can also optionally
cache these pre-parsed grammars for later use during actual parsing.
</p>
<p>Here is an example:</p>
<source>
XercesDOMParser parser;
// Enable schema processing.
parser.setDoSchema(true);
parser.setDONamespaces(true);
// Let's preparse the schema grammar (.xsd) and cache it.
Grammar* grammar = parser.loadGrammar(xmlFile, Grammar::SchemaGrammarType, true);
</source>
<p>Besides caching pre-parsed schema grammars, users can also cache any
grammars encountered during an xml document parse.
</p>
<p>Here is an example:</p>
<source>
SAXParser parser;
// Enable grammar caching by setting cacheGrammarFromParse to true.
// The parser will cache any encountered grammars if it does not
// exist in the pool.
// If the grammar is DTD, no internal subset is allowed.
parser.cacheGrammarFromParse(true);
// Let's parse our xml file (DTD grammar)
parser.parse(xmlFile);
// We can get the grammar where the root element was declared
// by calling the parser's method getRootGrammar;
// Note: The parser owns the grammar, and the user should not delete it.
Grammar* grammar = parser.getRootGrammar();
</source>
<p>We can use any previously cached grammars when parsing new xml
documents. Here are some examples on how to use those cached grammars:
</p>
<source>
/**
* Caching and reusing XML Schema (.xsd) grammar
* Parse an XML document and cache its grammar set. Then, use the cached
* grammar set in subsequent parses.
*/
XercesDOMParser parser;
// Enable schema processing
parser.setDoSchema(true);
parser.setDoNamespaces(true);
// Enable grammar caching
parser.cacheGrammarFromParse(true);
// Let's parse the XML document. The parser will cache any grammars encountered.
parser.parse(xmlFile);
// No need to enable re-use by setting useCachedGrammarInParse to true. It is
// automatically enabled with grammar caching.
for (int i=0; i&lt; 3; i++)
parser.parse(xmlFile);
// This will flush the grammar pool
parser.resetCachedGrammarPool();
</source>
<source>
/**
* Caching and reusing DTD grammar
* Preparse a grammar and cache it in the pool. Then, we use the cached grammar
* when parsing XML documents.
*/
SAX2XMLReader* parser = XMLReaderFactory::createXMLReader();
// Load grammar and cache it
parser->loadGrammar(dtdFile, Grammar::DTDGrammarType, true);
// enable grammar reuse
parser->setFeature(XMLUni::fgXercesUseCachedGrammarInParse, true);
// Parse xml files
parser->parse(xmlFile1);
parser->parse(xmlFile2);
</source>
<p>There are some limitations about caching and using cached grammars:</p>
<ul>
<li>When caching/reusing DTD grammars, no internal subset is allowed.</li>
<li>When preparsing grammars with caching option enabled, if a grammar, in the
result set, already exists in the pool (same namespace for schema or same system
id for DTD), the entire set will not be cached. This behavior is the default but can
be overridden for XML Schema caching. See the SAX/SAX2/DOM parser features for details.</li>
<li>When parsing an XML document with the grammar caching option enabled, the
reuse option is also automatically enabled. We will only parse a grammar if it
does not exist in the pool.</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<anchor name="LoadableMessageText"/>
<s2 title="Loadable Message Text">
<p>The &XercesCName; supports loadable message text. Although
the current distribution only supports English, it is capable of
supporting other
languages. Anyone interested in contributing any translations
should contact us. This would be an extremely useful
service.</p>
<p>In order to support the local message loading services, all the error messages
are captured in an XML file in the src/xercesc/NLS/ directory.
There is a simple program, in the tools/NLS/Xlat/ directory,
which can translate that text in various formats. It currently
supports a simple 'in memory' format (i.e. an array of
strings), the Win32 resource format, and the message catalog
format. The 'in memory' format is intended for very simple
installations or for use when porting to a new platform (since
you can use it until you can get your own local message
loading support done.)</p>
<p>In the src/xercesc/util/ directory, there is an XMLMsgLoader
class. This is an abstraction from which any number of
message loading services can be derived. Your platform driver
file can create whichever type of message loader it wants to
use on that platform. &XercesCName; currently has versions for the in
memory format, the Win32 resource format, the message
catalog format, and ICU message loader.
Some of the platforms can support multiple message
loaders, in which case a #define token is used to control
which one is used. You can set this in your build projects to
control the message loader type used.</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="PluggableTranscoders"/>
<s2 title="Pluggable Transcoders">
<p>&XercesCName; also supports pluggable transcoding services. The
XMLTransService class is an abstract API that can be derived
from, to support any desired transcoding
service. XMLTranscoder is the abstract API for a particular
instance of a transcoder for a particular encoding. The
platform driver file decides what specific type of transcoder
to use, which allows each platform to use its native
transcoding services, or the ICU service if desired.</p>
<p>Implementations are provided for Win32 native services, ICU
services, and the <ref>iconv</ref> services available on many
Unix platforms. The Win32 version only provides native code
page services, so it can only handle XML code in the intrinsic
encodings ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16 (Big/Small Endian), UCS4
(Big/Small Endian), EBCDIC code pages IBM037, IBM1047 and
IBM1140 encodings, ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin1) and Windows-1252. The ICU version
provides all of the encodings that ICU supports. The
<ref>iconv</ref> version will support the encodings supported
by the local system. You can use transcoders we provide or
create your own if you feel ours are insufficient in some way,
or if your platform requires an implementation that &XercesCName; does not
provide.</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="PortingGuidelines"/>
<s2 title="Porting Guidelines">
<p>All platform dependent code in &XercesCName; has been
isolated to a couple of files, which should ease the porting
effort. The <code>src/xercesc/util</code> directory
contains all such files. In particular:</p>
<ul>
<li>The <code>src/xercesc/util/FileManagers</code> directory
contains implementations of file managers for various
platforms.</li>
<li>The <code>src/xercesc/util/MutexManagers</code> directory
contains implementations of mutex managers for various
platforms.</li>
<li>The <code>src/xercesc/util/Xerces_autoconf_const*</code> files
provide base definitions for various platforms.</li>
</ul>
<p>Other concerns are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Does ICU compile on your platform? If not, then you'll need to
create a transcoder implementation that uses your local transcoding
services. The iconv transcoder should work for you, though perhaps
with some modifications.</li>
<li>What message loader will you use? To get started, you can use the
"in memory" one, which is very simple and easy. Then, once you get
going, you may want to adapt the message catalog message loader, or
write one of your own that uses local services.</li>
<li>What should I define XMLCh to be? Please refer to <jump
href="build-misc-&XercesC3Series;.html#XMLChInfo">What should I define XMLCh to be?</jump> for
further details.</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, you need to decide about how to define XMLCh. Generally,
XMLCh should be defined to be a type suitable for holding a
utf-16 encoded (16 bit) value, usually an <code>unsigned short</code>. </p>
<p>All XML data is handled within &XercesCName; as strings of
XMLCh characters. Regardless of the size of the
type chosen, the data stored in variables of type XMLCh
will always be utf-16 encoded values. </p>
<p>Unlike XMLCh, the encoding
of wchar_t is platform dependent. Sometimes it is utf-16
(AIX, Windows), sometimes ucs-4 (Solaris,
Linux), sometimes it is not based on Unicode at all
(HP/UX, AS/400, system 390). </p>
<p>Some earlier releases of &XercesCName; defined XMLCh to be the
same type as wchar_t on most platforms, with the goal of making
it possible to pass XMLCh strings to library or system functions
that were expecting wchar_t parameters. This approach has
been abandoned because of</p>
<ul>
<li>
Portability problems with any code that assumes that
the types of XMLCh and wchar_t are compatible
</li>
<li>Excessive memory usage, especially in the DOM, on
platforms with 32 bit wchar_t.
</li>
<li>utf-16 encoded XMLCh is not always compatible with
ucs-4 encoded wchar_t on Solaris and Linux. The
problem occurs with Unicode characters with values
greater than 64k; in ucs-4 the value is stored as
a single 32 bit quantity. With utf-16, the value
will be stored as a "surrogate pair" of two 16 bit
values. Even with XMLCh equated to wchar_t, xerces will
still create the utf-16 encoded surrogate pairs, which
are illegal in ucs-4 encoded wchar_t strings.
</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<anchor name="CPPNamespace"/>
<s2 title="Using C++ Namespace">
<p>&XercesCName; makes use of C++ namespace to make sure its
definitions do not conflict with other libraries and
applications. As a result applications must
namespace-qualify all &XercesCName; classes, data and
variables using the <code>xercesc</code> name. Alternatively,
applications can use <code>using xercesc::&lt;Name>;</code>
declarations
to make individual &XercesCName; names visible in the
current scope
or <code>using namespace xercesc;</code>
definition to make all &XercesCName; names visible in the
current scope.</p>
<p>While the above information should be sufficient for the majority
of applications, for cases where several versions of the &XercesCName;
library must be used in the same application, namespace versioning is
provided. The following convenience macros can be used to access the
&XercesCName; namespace names with versions embedded
(see <code>src/xercesc/util/XercesDefs.hpp</code>):</p>
<source>
#define XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_BEGIN namespace &XercesC3NSVersion; {
#define XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_END }
#define XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_USE using namespace &XercesC3NSVersion;;
#define XERCES_CPP_NAMESPACE_QUALIFIER &XercesC3NSVersion;::
namespace &XercesC3NSVersion; { }
namespace &XercesC3Namespace; = &XercesC3NSVersion;;
</source>
</s2>
<anchor name="SpecifyLocaleForMessageLoader"/>
<s2 title="Specify Locale for Message Loader">
<p>&XercesCName; provides mechanisms for Native Language Support (NLS).
Even though
the current distribution has only English message file, it is capable
of supporting other languages once the translated version of the
target language is available.</p>
<p>An application can specify the locale for the message loader in their
very first invocation to XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() by supplying
a parameter for the target locale intended. The default locale is "en_US".
</p>
<source>
// Initialize the parser system
try
{
XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize("fr_FR");
}
catch ()
{
}
</source>
</s2>
<anchor name="SpecifyLocationForMessageLoader"/>
<s2 title="Specify Location for Message Loader">
<p>&XercesCName; searches for message files at the location
specified in the <code>XERCESC_NLS_HOME</code> environment
variable and, if that is not set, at the default
message directory, <code>$XERCESCROOT/msg</code>.
</p>
<p>Application can specify an alternative location for the message files in their
very first invocation to XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() by supplying
a parameter for the alternative location.
</p>
<source>
// Initialize the parser system
try
{
XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize("en_US", "/usr/nls");
}
catch ()
{
}
</source>
</s2>
<anchor name="PluggablePanicHandler"/>
<s2 title="Pluggable Panic Handler">
<p>&XercesCName; reports panic conditions encountered to the panic
handler installed. The panic handler can take whatever action
appropriate to handle the panic condition.
</p>
<p>&XercesCName; allows application to provide a customized panic handler
(class implementing the interface PanicHandler), in its very first invocation of
XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize().
</p>
<p>In the absence of an application-specific panic handler, &XercesCName; default
panic handler is installed and used, which aborts program whenever a panic
condition is encountered.
</p>
<source>
// Initialize the parser system
try
{
PanicHandler* ph = new MyPanicHandler();
XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize("en_US",
"/usr/nls",
ph);
}
catch ()
{
}
</source>
</s2>
<anchor name="PluggableMemoryManager"/>
<s2 title="Pluggable Memory Manager">
<p>Certain applications wish to maintain precise control over
memory allocation. This enables them to recover more easily
from crashes of individual components, as well as to allocate
memory more efficiently than a general-purpose OS-level
procedure with no knowledge of the characteristics of the
program making the requests for memory. In &XercesCName; this
is supported via the Pluggable Memory Handler.
</p>
<p>Users who wish to implement their own MemoryManager,
an interface found in <code>xercesc/framework/MemoryManager.hpp</code>,
need to implement only two methods:</p>
<source>
// This method allocates requested memory.
// the parameter is the requested memory size
// A pointer to the allocated memory is returned.
virtual void* allocate(XMLSize_t size) = 0;
// This method deallocates memory
// The parameter is a pointer to the allocated memory to be deleted
virtual void deallocate(void* p) = 0;
</source>
<p>To maximize the amount of flexibility that applications
have in terms of controlling memory allocation, a
MemoryManager instance may be set as part of the call to
XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize() to allow for static
initialization to be done with the given MemoryHandler; a
(possibly different) MemoryManager may be passed in to the
constructors of all Xerces parser objects as well, and all
dynamic allocations within the parsers will make use of this
object. Assuming that MyMemoryHandler is a class that
implements the MemoryManager interface, here is a bit of
pseudocode which illustrates these ideas:
</p>
<source>
MyMemoryHandler *mm_for_statics = new MyMemoryHandler();
MyMemoryHandler *mm_for_particular_parser = new MyMemoryManager();
// initialize the parser information; try/catch
// removed for brevity
XMLPlatformUtils::Initialize(XMLUni::fgXercescDefaultLocale, 0,0,
mm_for_statics);
// create a parser object
XercesDOMParser *parser = new
XercesDomParser(mm_for_particular_parser);
// ...
delete parser;
XMLPlatformUtils::Terminate();
</source>
<p>
If a user provides a MemoryManager object to the parser, then
the user owns that object. It is also important to note that
&XercesCName; default implementation simply uses the global
new and delete operators.
</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="SecurityManager"/>
<s2 title="Managing Security Vulnerabilities">
<p>
The purpose of the SecurityManager class is to permit applications a
means to have the parser reject documents whose processing would
otherwise consume large amounts of system resources. Malicious
use of such documents could be used to launch a denial-of-service
attack against a system running the parser. Initially, the
SecurityManager only knows about attacks that can result from
exponential entity expansion; this is the only known attack that
involves processing a single XML document. Other, similar attacks
can be launched if arbitrary schemas may be parsed; there already
exist means (via use of the EntityResolver interface) by which
applications can deny processing of untrusted schemas. In future,
the SecurityManager will be expanded to take these other exploits
into account.
</p>
<p>
The SecurityManager class is very simple: It will contain
getters and setters corresponding to each known variety of
exploit. These will reflect limits that the application may
impose on the parser with respect to the processing of various
XML constructs. When an instance of SecurityManager is
instantiated, default values for these limits will be provided
that should suit most applications.
</p>
<p>
By default, &XercesCName; is a wholly conformant XML parser; that
is, no security-related considerations will be observed by
default. An application must provide an instance of the
SecurityManager class to a parser in order to make that
parser behave in a security-conscious manner. For example:
</p>
<source>
SAXParser *myParser = new SAXParser();
SecurityManager *myManager = new SecurityManager();
myManager->setEntityExpansionLimit(100000); // larger than default
myParser->setSecurityManager(myManager);
// ... use the parser
</source>
<p>
Note that SecurityManager instances may be set on all kinds of
&XercesCName; parsers; please see the documentation for the
individual parsers for details.
</p>
<p>
Note also that the application always owns the SecurityManager
instance. The default SecurityManager that &XercesCName; provides
is not thread-safe; although it only uses primitive operations at
the moment, users may need to extend the class with a
thread-safe implementation on some platforms.
</p>
</s2>
<anchor name="UseSpecificScanner"/>
<s2 title="Use Specific Scanner">
<p>For performance and modularity &XercesCName; provides a mechanism
for specifying the scanner to be used when scanning an XML document.
Such mechanism will enable the creation of special purpose scanners
that can be easily plugged in.</p>
<p>&XercesCName; supports the following scanners:</p>
<s3 title="WFXMLScanner">
<p>
The WFXMLScanner is a non-validating scanner which performs well-formedness check only.
It does not do any DTD/XMLSchema processing. If the XML document contains a DOCTYPE, it
will be silently ignored (i.e. no warning message is issued). Similarly, any schema
specific attributes (e.g. schemaLocation), will be treated as normal element attributes.
Setting grammar specific features/properties will have no effect on its behavior
(e.g. setLoadExternalDTD(true) is ignored).
</p>
<source>
// Create a DOM parser
XercesDOMParser parser;
// Specify scanner name
parser.useScanner(XMLUni::fgWFXMLScanner);
// Specify other parser features, e.g.
parser.setDoNamespaces(true);
</source>
</s3>
<s3 title="DGXMLScanner">
<p>
The DGXMLScanner handles XML documents with DOCTYPE information. It does not do any
XMLSchema processing, which means that any schema specific attributes (e.g. schemaLocation),
will be treated as normal element attributes. Setting schema grammar specific features/properties
will have no effect on its behavior (e.g. setDoSchema(true) and setLoadSchema(true) are ignored).
</p>
<source>
// Create a SAX parser
SAXParser parser;
// Specify scanner name
parser.useScanner(XMLUni::fgDGXMLScanner);
// Specify other parser features, e.g.
parser.setLoadExternalDTD(true);
</source>
</s3>
<s3 title="SGXMLScanner">
<p>
The SGXMLScanner handles XML documents with XML schema grammar information.
If the XML document contains a DOCTYPE, it will be ignored. Namespace and
schema processing features are on by default, and setting them to off has
not effect.
</p>
<source>
// Create a SAX2 parser
SAX2XMLReader* parser = XMLReaderFactory::createXMLReader();
// Specify scanner name
parser->setProperty(XMLUni::fgXercesScannerName, (void *)XMLUni::fgSGXMLScanner);
// Specify other parser features, e.g.
parser->setFeature(XMLUni::fgXercesSchemaFullChecking, false);
</source>
</s3>
<s3 title="IGXMLScanner">
<p>
The IGXMLScanner is an integrated scanner and handles XML documents with DTD and/or
XML schema grammar. This is the default scanner used by the various parsers if no
scanner is specified.
</p>
<source>
// Create a DOMLSParser parser
DOMLSParser *parser = ((DOMImplementationLS*)impl)->createLSParser(
DOMImplementationLS::MODE_SYNCHRONOUS, 0);
// Specify scanner name - This is optional as IGXMLScanner is the default
parser->getDomConfig()->setParameter(
XMLUni::fgXercesScannerName, (void *)XMLUni::fgIGXMLScanner);
// Specify other parser features, e.g.
parser->getDomConfig()->setParameter(XMLUni::fgDOMNamespaces, doNamespaces);
parser->getDomConfig()->setParameter(XMLUni::fgXercesSchema, doSchema);
</source>
</s3>
</s2>
</s1>