Bug #2847
closedreturnfields need full xpath support
0%
Description
the current implementation of xpath used in metacat for the purpose of returning specific fields of an xml document within a returnset is not sufficient for highly structured documents. more or full xpath support needs to be implemented. currently, if you specify "/x/y" as a return field and the document is structured
<x>
<y>
<z>...</z>
<z>...</z>
</y>
</x>
metacat will return nothing. metacat seems to require that you specify the exact xpath to a node or it just returns null. This really doesn't work for any document that contains formatting (such as <p>, <i>, <b>, etc) within the xml.
Updated by ben leinfelder almost 16 years ago
after discussing this in the 1.9 triage meeting, it was decided that this will not be implemented. Returning ALL the leaves under a given node could be dangerous, and the client will likely not know how to deal with variable/extra returnfields given in the resultset document.
Updated by ben leinfelder almost 16 years ago
(btw, those <p>, <i> and <b> tags look like html - maybe they should be surrounded by CDATA?)