RE: [docbook-apps] Alternative to entities?

["Peter Ring" <PRI at magnus dot dk>]

Give it a try. In my experience, XInclude is well integrated in XXE.

First, on the Options | Edit tab, you'd have selected Type of document reference: 'XInclude' or 'Entity when possible, XInclude otherwise'.

Then you could go along like this:
1) open both entities.xml and the document that you are authoring
2) select the element in entities.xml that you want to reference
3) select Edit | Document Reference | Copy as Reference or type Ctrl+Shift+C
4a) to insert an inline element, set the insertion point in your document and type Ctrl+V
4b) to insert a block element, set the insertion point in your document and type Ctrl+U (paste before) or Ctrl+W (paste after).

There's a tutorial [1].

The reference could look like this

    <xi:include href="entties.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
                xpointer="productname" />

or

    <xi:include href="entties.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
                xpointer="element(productname)" />

or

    <xi:include href="entties.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
                xpointer="xpointer(id('productname'))" />

or

    <xi:include href="entties.xml" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
                xpointer="element(/1/2/3)" />

AFAIK, there's a couple of limitations. Not all off the XPointer scheme is supported; the XPointer expression must yield a result infoset with one node; and one particular feature that I miss

    <xi:include href="some-source-code-or-xml-file" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";
                parse="text">

XXE will quote the included file as it is supposed to, but the reference will be gone, replaced by the quoted content of the included file.

[1] http://www.xmlmind.com/xmleditor/tutorial.html#id.s2

kind regards
Peter Ring

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jirka Kosek [mailto:jirka@kosek.cz]
> Sent: 17. januar 2005 19:52
> To: davep@dpawson.co.uk
> Cc: Gurra Green; Docbook-Apps
> Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Alternative to entities?
> 
> 
> Dave Pawson wrote:
> 
> > Not speaking from experience.
> > 
> > If an xinclude aware processor is used, 
> > could that stand in for XML entities Jirka?
> 
> Yep, you can use something like
> 
> <xi:include href="entities.xml#productname"/>
> 
> to pull element from external file entities.xml:
> 
> <root>
>    <phrase xml:id="productname">SuperSoft v3.5</phrase>
>    ...
> </root>
> 
> But as you can see XInclude is quite verbose in this case and I'm not 
> sure whether XXE can deal with such XIncludes.
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>    Jirka Kosek     e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz     http://www.kosek.cz
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