Re: [jsr-314-open] Adding handling of CDATA blocks in ResponseWriter

On 2 Apr 2009, at 20:50, Jim Driscoll wrote: > Greetings EG memebers. > > I have an implementation problem, and the cleanest, most effective > solution is a change in the API, so I'm sending you this email. > > The problem: > > The current javax.faces.context.ResponseWriter class is aware of > XML structure, in that it has methods for writing things like > Elements, Comments, and Attributes. However, CDATA blocks are > currently not handled by the API defined there. > > The RI previous to this release got around this problem by > overloading the startElement and endElement method semantics - if > you passed a tag name of "CDATA", then it would start a CDATA block. > > Since nothing in the public API used CDATA, this worked fine. > > Now, for PartialRequests, CDATA blocks are used by the API. > > You cannot embed CDATA blocks within CDATA blocks, so both the API > and the Impl need to be aware of when CDATA blocks happen, and they > need to coordinate their actions. > > This means that we need to update ResponseWriter to be aware of > CDATA blocks. > > There are two ways we can go about doing this: > > 1) Standardize the existing behavior of the implementation, so that > startElement("CDATA", component) and endElement("CDATA") start and > end CDATA blocks. > > or > > 2) Add two new menthods, startCDATA() and endCDATA() to > ResponseWriter. I strongly prefer this approach, it doesn't rely on magic.

> > > I marginally favor the first approach, mostly since it's not a > common need, it's less work, and it doesn't add two new methods > that almost noone will use. It's also the way that the RI > currently uses, which hasn't seemed to cause any issues. (It also > requires less RI work, so that may be biasing me, though that's > almost never a reason to chose a public API.) > > Ryan somewhat favors the second approach, since it's cleaner, > architecturally, to separate out the start and stop of the cdata. > > But in the end, we're open to which ever way the consensus of the > EG goes. > > Please reply by COB Monday on this issue, if you have an opinion. > We need to wrap this up quickly, we're under a great deal of time > pressure. > > Jim -- Pete Muir http://www.seamframework.org http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Pete