Saxomattic

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'saxomattic'

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install saxomattic

Saxomattic is a combination of sax-machine and active_attr If you want to know more about those probjects, check them out!

Saxomattic allows for a declarative syntax to define "models" that are mappable to xml documents so xml parsing is declarative (through sax-machine semantics) and typecasting/attribute presence/default values are provided by active_attr. So.......how about an example? (let's walk through the spec example)

  class SaxTesterEmbedception
    include Saxomattic

    attribute :type, :attribute => true
    attribute :value, :value => true
    attribute :not_even_used
  end

  class SaxTesterEmbedded
    include Saxomattic

    attribute :embed
    attribute :foo, :type => Integer
    attribute :embedception, :class => SaxTesterEmbedception
  end

  class SaxTesterSomething
    include Saxomattic

    attribute :baz
    attribute :foo, :type => Integer
    attribute :iso_8701, :type => Date
    attribute :date, :type => Date
    attribute :datetime, :type => DateTime
    attribute :embedded, :elements => true, :class => SaxTesterEmbedded
  end

  xml = <<-XML
    <test>
      <baz>baz</baz>
      <iso_8701>2013-01-13</iso_8701>
      <datetime>2013-08-13T14:45:55-06:00</datetime>
      <embedded>
        <foo>2</foo>
        <embed>HERE!</embed>
        <embedception type="TYPE">VALUE</embedception>
      </embedded>
      <date>2013-08-13</date>
      <foo>2</foo>
    </test>
    XML

The classes above SaxTesterEmbedception, SaxTesterEmbedded, SaxTesterSomething are the data models that map to the xml assigned to variable xml. Instead of the sax-machine element syntax we have standardized on using attribute to declare the attributes and how a model maps to the xml document. Any override of the attribute that would typically be handled in sax-machine by using elements, attribute, value need to be accessed through the hash syntax ... ie attribute :type, :attribute => true tells active_attr that the attribute type should have setters/getters and tells sax-machine that the value should come from the attribute on the xml node type.

Parsing xml:

  something = SaxTesterSomething.parse(xml)

  something.baz                               # => baz
  something.foo                               # => 2
  something.foo_before_type_cast              # => "2"
  something.embedded.size                     # => 1
  something.embedded.first.foo                # => 2
  something.embedded.first.embedception.type  # => "TYPE"
  something.embedded.first.embedception.value # => "VALUE"

Based on this short example, hopefully you can see that declaring your data models is a great way to make data models based on xml documents easier to work with. And if you don't .... do something else!

Enjoy!

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request