Hm, not sure but maybe FasterXML's Jackson? It supports alternative non JSON data formats among which YAML, XML. But maybe that one is a huge dependency. M. On 12/08/20 12:38, Christian Grün wrote:

Hi Marco, hi Fabrice,

YAML serialization would be a nice feature indeed.

Are you aware of existing (ideally bidirectional) mappings that would be appropriate for general use?

Cheers Christian

Marco Lettere <m.lettere@gmail.com <mailto:m.lettere@gmail.com>> schrieb am Mi., 12. Aug. 2020, 12:04:

Dear BaseX team,

just out of curiosity, could you imagine what kind of effort it would be to provide YAML as another serialization method for BaseX in addition to XML, HTML, JSON, CSV?

The datamodel seems pretty close to the JSON one so maybe a very similar transformation to XML could be implemented ...

Ciao,

Marco.

@Marco: Do you know which conversions are provided by FasterXML: arbitrary XML → YAML, arbitrary YAML → XML, or both? If the underlying conversion rules are promising, we could include them a 'fasterxml' format in BaseX (similar to the 'jsonml' format).

As far as I can understand from the docs and the code on github there Jackson is a sort of hub with several dataformat modules which are able to parse and serialize from the various formats. I don't know whether, with the term arbitrary, you mean to be able to provide your own syntax for the XML serialization. In this case I am not sure. M.

Remark: support for a roundtrip-able XML representation of YAML would consolidate BaseX's great position as a data integration platform, further increasing the number of continents (mediatypes) which can be travelled on the highway of XPath (XML, JSON, CSV, HTML, YAML). In comparison, I think, YAML representation of arbitrary XML would be a nicety without strategic significance. Hans-Jürgen Am Mittwoch, 12. August 2020, 18:38:10 MESZ hat Christian Grün <christian.gruen@gmail.com> Folgendes geschrieben: I was wondering if you can successfully serialize any arbitrary XML document to a YAML representing, ideally without losing information (attributes, comments, etc.), and convert the result back to the original XML representation. I would guess that YAML to XML conversions is easier. Apart from that, it would surely be possible to write a little XQuery module that performs all the conversions (just a matter of time?). Marco Lettere <m.lettere@gmail.com> schrieb am Mi., 12. Aug. 2020, 18:31:

@Marco: Do you know which conversions are provided by FasterXML: arbitrary XML → YAML, arbitrary YAML → XML, or both? If the underlying conversion rules are promising, we could include them a 'fasterxml' format in BaseX (similar to the 'jsonml' format).

As far as I can understand from the docs and the code on github there Jackson is a sort of hub with several dataformat modules which are able to parse and serialize from the various formats. I don't know whether, with the term arbitrary, you mean to be able to provide your own syntax for the XML serialization. In this case I am not sure. M.

Hi Marco, Hans-Jürgen, Martin, Fabrice, I had a look at the YAML spec [1], and I noticed it’s somewhat more bulky than the JSON spec [2]. In addition, I checked out the YAML to XML conversion of FasterXML. It seems to handle the basic cases, but e.g. cannot process lists, comments or references. Maybe I’m not properly using it, though. I have attached a very basic Eclipse project for those who want to have a closer look. My guess is that there is no existing implementation of the official XML binding draft available [3] (and it might be interesting to find out why before we follow this path). Has anyone of you already worked with XML representations of YAML? Best, Christian [1] https://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8259 [3] https://yaml.org/xml On Wed, Aug 12, 2020 at 7:21 PM Christian Grün <christian.gruen@gmail.com> wrote:

Hans-Jürgen, thanks for you assessment. I see that there may be no real need for a JsonML equivalent for YAML. And my assumption is that the binding from yaml.org my be the most appropriate solution for now. Similar to our JSON mapper, it uses underscore element names to represent arrays.

Hans-Juergen Rennau <hrennau@yahoo.de> schrieb am Mi., 12. Aug. 2020, 18:59:

...

Remark: support for a roundtrip-able XML representation of YAML would consolidate BaseX's great position as a data integration platform, further increasing the number of continents (mediatypes) which can be travelled on the highway of XPath (XML, JSON, CSV, HTML, YAML).

In comparison, I think, YAML representation of arbitrary XML would be a nicety without strategic significance.

Hans-Jürgen

Am Mittwoch, 12. August 2020, 18:38:10 MESZ hat Christian Grün <christian.gruen@gmail.com> Folgendes geschrieben:

I was wondering if you can successfully serialize any arbitrary XML document to a YAML representing, ideally without losing information (attributes, comments, etc.), and convert the result back to the original XML representation.

I would guess that YAML to XML conversions is easier.

Apart from that, it would surely be possible to write a little XQuery module that performs all the conversions (just a matter of time?).

Marco Lettere <m.lettere@gmail.com> schrieb am Mi., 12. Aug. 2020, 18:31:

...

@Marco: Do you know which conversions are provided by FasterXML: arbitrary XML → YAML, arbitrary YAML → XML, or both? If the underlying conversion rules are promising, we could include them a 'fasterxml' format in BaseX (similar to the 'jsonml' format).

As far as I can understand from the docs and the code on github there Jackson is a sort of hub with several dataformat modules which are able to parse and serialize from the various formats.

I don't know whether, with the term arbitrary, you mean to be able to provide your own syntax for the XML serialization. In this case I am not sure.

M.