XSD/e 3.2.0 released
XSD/e 3.2.0 was released yesterday. In case you are not familiar with XSD/e, it is a dependency-free XML Schema to C++ compiler for mobile, embedded, and light-weight C++ applications. It provides XML parsing, serialization, XML Schema validation and XML data binding while maintaining a small footprint and portability.
This version includes a number of major new features (examined in more detail next), small improvements, and bug fixes. It also adds official support, instructions, and sample configuration files for the following platforms and toolchains:
- Android/Android NDK
- Symbian/CSL-GCC (GCCE)
- Integrity 178b/Green Hills MULTI C/C++
It is now also possible to build the XSD/e runtime library for iPhoneOS/iOS with the XCode project.
Enum mapping
Probably the most visible new feature is the mapping of XML Schema enumerations to C++ enum. Consider, for example, the following schema fragment:
<simpleType name="genre"> <restriction base="string"> <enumeration value="romance"/> <enumeration value="fiction"/> <enumeration value="horror"/> <enumeration value="history"/> <enumeration value="philosophy"/> </restriction> </simpleType>
The new interface for the genre C++ class will look like this:
class genre
{
public:
enum value_type
{
romance,
fiction,
horror,
history,
philosophy
};
genre ();
genre (value_type);
void value (value_type);
operator value_type () const
const char* string () const;
};
And we can use this class like this:
genre g (genre::fiction); if (g != genre::philosophy) cout << g.string () << endl;
Memory allocators
You can now configure the XSD/e runtime and generated code to perform memory management using custom memory allocator functions provided by your application instead of the standard operator new/delete. The allocator example provided with the XSD/e distribution uses this feature to completely eliminate dynamic memory allocations. In particular, the resulting object model is placed into a memory block allocated on the stack. Cool, huh?
Schema evolution
Often new features that are added to the application require changes to the corresponding schemas. In mobile and embedded systems this poses a significant challenge since it is often impossible to upgrade the devices that are out in the field. As a result, it is a common requirement that devices running older versions of the software be able to cope with data that is based on the newer versions of the schema. In this release XSD/e adds support for such schema evolution using the substitution groups mechanism. Both the ignore and passthrough models for unknown content are supported.
Configurable character encoding
It is now possible to configure the character encoding used in the application with the currently supported options being UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1. Note that this encoding is not the same as the XML document encoding that is being parsed or serialized. Rather, it is the encoding that is used inside the application. When an XML document is parsed, the character data is automatically converted to the application encoding. Similarly, when an XML document is serialized, the data in the application encoding is automatically converted to the resulting document encoding.
There are also other important features in this release, including the generation of clone functions for variable-length types, improved support for XML Schema facet validation, including xs:pattern, etc. For an exhaustive list of new features see the official XSD/e 3.2.0 release announcement.