I ran into a couple of stumbling blocks today using a particular company's XML request API, and it made me wonder about the restrictions we put in our software that have no apparent reason.
My plan was simple: create a struct/hash/associative array that matches the structure of the XML document, run it through a 10-line or so function that translates that to XML, and send the data to the service provider. Simple enough - my code doesn't even need to know the structure - the programmer using it would provide that, and the service provider doubles as the validator! My code was almost the perfect code. It did almost nothing, and certainly nothing more than it was meant or needed to do.
But alas, it was not meant to be. Instead, the service provider has a couple of restrictions:
The first was regarding case (as in upper/lower). The XML elements needed to have the same case as described in the documentation (which contained at least one element that wasn't in the
real specification anyway). That's fine - I can live with that. But it annoyed me a little that they saw fit to use camelCase. (this is only a machine, after all. I don't think it cares if it can easily read the differentWordsAllBunchedUpTogether.)
At least if they had chosen all upper or all lower I can easily switch the case of my own, but requiring camelCase made my code quite a bit nastier than it needed to be. Now, I have to provide a lookup mechanism for each element in the XML. Of course, if the language I was using was case sensitive, this wouldn't be a big deal at all. However, even though it
is not sensitive to case, this is still not
that bad of an issue.
But then restriction number two comes along: all elements must be sent in the order they appear in the specification. We're just passing data around here. The XML describes the data in the first place, so what use is ordering it? I understand that parent/child relationships must remain intact, but I cannot see how there could possibly be a good reason that the "firstName" element should come before the "lastName" element. (Can you? I'd love to know!) Why don't we just go to a flat file and forget about the angled brackets altogether?
I might as well have just hard-coded the XML and had a variable for every element/attribute!
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Sounds like you might be working with the new Authorize.net recurring billing API? Their requirement that the elements be in a specific order (which maybe I missed, but didn't see in the docs) threw me for a quite a while.
Posted by
Ryan Stille
on Aug 05, 2007 at 11:20 PM UTC - 5 hrs
I won't tell, but you are quite perceptive! =)
Posted by
Sam
on Aug 06, 2007 at 10:40 AM UTC - 5 hrs
