Update on WOXML

A clarification regarding yesterday’s post on Apple’s XML framework, although I still do think that it is of too poor quality to be released. Perhaps many of the bugs we’ve struggled with are fixed in WebObjects 5, but I know that some of them still are there. (I will examine this in a few days, should not Malte beat me to it.)

What we’ve most recently struggled with are that to-one relationships can’t be null. We tried making them to-many and “simulating” to-one relationships, but this doesn’t work for us, so we reverted. Perhaps it would work for you. Our current approach is to substitute all nulls with “Null Objects” (that is, objects that represent null values) before marshalling, and vice versa after unmarshalling – and it works, but it probably isn’t feasible if you have lots and lots of optional to-one relationships.

If you have troubles with WOXMLCoding, don’t hesitate to mail me and I’ll try to help.