DXL export and the DTD

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

I have spent the last couple of weeks working intently on transforming DXL exported from a Notes database using XSLT, and encountered several difficulties.

  1. Text fields such as the following are output but cannot be transformed by either Notes or IE, because the ‘<’ sign has not been encoded as <

Select * from table where amount<=500

The same holds true for ‘&’ which should be changed to & and may also be true for other character entities.

  1. The way that richtext is encoded, while very parallel with how CD blocks work in the NSF structure, are very difficult to use with XSL.

In particular the idea that elements without a def attribute default to the last used def attribute is very hard to code in XSL. I would think that it would easy for the DXL exporter to add a def attribute to every element and make coding XSL significantly more easy for richtext elements.

Any thoughts on the possibility that these changes could be made to the exporter (and perhaps the DTD and importer would need to change as well)?

2

Subject: DXL export and the DTD

The first one clearly seems to be a bug. I will look into proposing that it be fixed for 6.02 if possible.As to the second one, you have a very good point. We will consider it. I hesitate to change the Exporter to unconditionally emit a par def attribute, because people that rely on diffing DXL from one release to the next could get some artificial diffs. On the other hand, it’s harder to justify something for a MR if it involves new options in the API.