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@settitle The Ada95 XML Library
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@title The Ada95 Unicode and XML Library
@subtitle Version @value{XMLVersion}
@subtitle Document revision level $Revision: 1.25 $
@subtitle Date: $Date: 2006/01/02 16:39:12 $
@author AdaCore

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Copyright @copyright{} 2000-2002, Emmanuel Briot

Copyright @copyright{} 2003-2006, AdaCore

This document may be copied, in whole or in part, in any form or by any
means, as is or with alterations, provided that (1) alterations are clearly
marked as alterations and (2) this copyright notice is included
unmodified in any copy.

@end titlepage

@ifnottex
@node Top, Introduction, (dir), (dir)
@top The Ada95 Unicode and XML Library

@ifhtml
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Download other versions of the documentation
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The Ada95 XML Library

Version @value{XMLVersion}

Date: $Date: 2006/01/02 16:39:12 $

Copyright @copyright{} 2000-2002, Emmanuel Briot
This document may be copied, in whole or in part, in any form or by any
means, as is or with alterations, provided that (1) alterations are clearly
marked as alterations and (2) this copyright notice is included
unmodified in any copy.

@menu
* Introduction::
* The Unicode module::
* The Input module::
* The SAX module::
* The DOM module::
* The XML_GTK module::
* The Schema module::
* Using the library::

@detailmenu
 --- The Detailed Node Listing ---

The Unicode module

* Glyphs::
* Repertoires and subsets::
* Character sets::
* Character encoding schemes::
* Misc. functions::

The Input module

The SAX module

* SAX Description::
* SAX Examples::
* SAX Parser::
* SAX Handlers::
* Using SAX::
* Understanding SAX error messages::

The DOM module
* Using DOM::

The XML_GTK module

The Schema module
* XML Grammars::
* XML Schema Syntax::
* Connecting XML documents and schemas::
* Validating documents with SAX::

Using the library

@end detailmenu
@end menu
@end ifnottex

@iftex
@contents
@end iftex

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Introduction
@chapter Introduction
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML
Its goal is to enable generic
SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is
now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation
and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML.

This library includes a set of Ada95 packages to manipulate XML input. It
implements the XML 1.0 standard (see the references at the end of this
document), as well as support for namespaces and a number of other
optional standards related to XML.

We have tried to follow as closely as possible the XML standard, so that
you can easily analyze and reuse languages produced for other languages.

This document isn't a tutorial on what XML is, nor on the various
standards like DOM and SAX. Although we will try and give a few
examples, we refer the reader to the standards themselves, which are all
easily readable.


@c ??? Explain what XML is

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node The Unicode module
@chapter The Unicode module
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@c --- The following comes directly from www.unicode.org ----
@noindent
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.

Fundamentally, computers just deal with numbers. They store letters and
other characters by assigning a number for each one. Before Unicode was
invented, there were hundreds of different encoding systems for
assigning these numbers. No single encoding could contain enough
characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several
different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single
language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the
letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.

These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two
encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use
different numbers for the same character. Any given computer (especially
servers) needs to support many different encodings; yet whenever data is
passed between different encodings or platforms, that data always runs
the risk of corruption.

Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. The
Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP,
IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many
others. Unicode is required by modern standards such as XML, Java,
ECMAScript (JavaScript), LDAP, CORBA 3.0, WML, etc., and is the official
way to implement ISO/IEC 10646. It is supported in many operating
systems, all modern browsers, and many other products. The emergence of
the Unicode Standard, and the availability of tools supporting it, are
among the most significant recent global software technology trends.

@c --- End of www.unicode.org ---

The following sections explain the basic vocabulary and concepts
associated with Unicode and encodings.

Most of the information comes from the official Unicode Web site, at
@url{http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr17}.

Part of this documentation comes from @url{http://www.unicode.org}, the
official web site for Unicode.

Some information was also extracted from the "UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ"
by M. Kuhn, available at @url{???}.

@menu
* Glyphs::
* Repertoires and subsets::
* Character sets::
* Character encoding schemes::
* Misc. functions::
@end menu

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Glyphs
@section Glyphs
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
A glyph is a particular representation of a character or part of a
character.

Several representations are possible, mostly depending on the exact font
used at that time. A single glyph can correspond to a sequence of characters,
or a single character to a sequence of glyphs.

The Unicode standard doesn't deal with glyphs, although a suggested
representation is given for each character in the standard. Likewise, this
module doesn't provide any graphical support for Unicode, and will just
deal with textual memory representation and encodings.

Take a look at the @b{GtkAda} library that provides the graphical interface
for unicode in the upcoming 2.0 version.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Repertoires and subsets
@section Repertoires and subsets
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
A repertoire is a set of abstract characters to be encoded, normally
a familiar alphabet or symbol set. For instance, the alphabet used to
spell English words, or the one used for the Russian alphabet are two
such repertoires.

There exist two types of repertoires, close and open ones. The former
is the most common one, and the two examples above are such repertoires.
No character is ever added to them.

Unicode is also a repertoire, but an open one. New entries are
added to it. However, it is guaranteed that none will ever be deleted from it.
Unicode intends to be a universal repertoire, with all possible
characters currently used in the world. It currently contains all the
alphabets, including a number of alphabets associated with dead languages
like hieroglyphs. It also contains a number of often used symbols, like
mathematical signs.

The goal of this Unicode module is to convert all characters to entries in
the Unicode repertoire, so that any applications can communicate with each
other in a portable manner.

Given its size, most applications will only support a subset of Unicode.
Some of the scripts, most notably Arabic and Asian languages, require a
special support in the application (right-to-left writing,...), and thus will
not be supported by some applications.

The Unicode standard includes a set of internal catalogs, called
collections. Each character in these collections is given a special name,
in addition to its code, to improve readability.

Several child packages (@b{Unicode.Names.*}) define those names. For
instance:

@table @b
@item Unicode.Names.Basic_Latin
This contains the basic characters used in most western European languages,
including the standard ASCII subset.

@item Unicode.Names.Cyrillic
This contains the Russian alphabet.

@item Unicode.Names.Mathematical_Operators
This contains several mathematical symbols
@end table

More than 80 such packages exist.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Character sets
@section Character sets
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
A character set is a mapping from a set of abstract characters to some
non-negative integers. The integer associated with a character is called
its code point, and the character itself is called the encoded character.

There exist a number of standard character sets, unfortunately not compatible
with each other. For instance, ASCII is one of these character sets, and
contains 128 characters. A super-set of it is the ISO/8859-1 character set.
Another character set is the JIS X 0208, used to encode Japanese characters.

Note that a character set is different from a repertoire. For instance, the
same character C with cedilla doesn't have the same integer value in the
ISO/8859-1 character set and the ISO/8859-2 character set.

Unicode is also such a character set, that contains all the possible
characters and associate a standard integer with them. A similar and
fully compatible character set is ISO/10646. The only addition that Unicode
does to ISO/10646 is that it also specifies algorithms for rendering
presentation forms of some scripts (say Arabic), handling of bi-directional
texts that mix for instance Latin and Hebrew, algorithms for sorting and
string comparison, and much more.

Currently, our Unicode package doesn't include any support for these
algorithms.

Unicode and ISO 10646 define formally a 31-bit character set. However,
of this huge code space, so far characters have been assigned only to
the first 65534 positions (0x0000 to 0xFFFD). The characters that are
expected to be encoded outside the 16-bit range belong all to rather
exotic scripts (e.g., Hieroglyphics) that are only used by specialists
for historic and scientific purposes

The Unicode module contains a set of packages to provide conversion from some
of the most common character sets to and from Unicode. These are the
@b{Unicode.CCS.*} packages.

All these packages have a common structure:

@enumerate
@item They define a global variable of type @code{Character_Set} with two
fields, ie the two conversion functions between the given character set and
Unicode.

These functions convert one character (actually its code point) at a time.

@item They also define a number of standard names associated with this
character set. For instance, the ISO/8859-1 set is also known as Latin1.

The function @code{Unicode.CCS.Get_Character_Set} can be used to find a
character set by its standard name.
@end enumerate

Currently, the following sets are supported:
@table @b
@item ISO/8859-1 aka Latin1
This is the standard character set used to represent most Western
European languages including: Albanian, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English,
Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Irish, Icelandic, Italian,
Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.

@item ISO/8859-2 aka Latin2
This character set supports the Slavic languages of Central Europe
which use the Latin alphabet. The ISO-8859-2 set is used for the following
languages: Czech, Croat, German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak and
Slovenian.

@item ISO/8859-3
This character set is used for Esperanto, Galician, Maltese and Turkish

@item ISO/8859-4
Some letters were added to the ISO-8859-4 to support languages such as
Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. It is an incomplete precursor of the
Latin 6 set.

@end table

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Character encoding schemes
@section Character encoding schemes
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
We now know how each encoded character can be represented by an integer
value (code point) depending on the character set.

Character encoding schemes deal with the representation of a sequence
of integers to a sequence of code units. A code unit is a sequence of
bytes on a computer architecture.

There exists a number of possible encoding schemes. Some of them encode
all integers on the same number of bytes. They are called fixed-width
encoding forms, and include the standard encoding for Internet emails
(@b{7bits}, but it can't encode all characters), as well as the simple
@b{8bits} scheme, or the @b{EBCDIC} scheme. Among them is also the
@b{UTF-32} scheme which is defined in the Unicode standard.

Another set of encoding schemes encode integers on a variable number of
bytes. These include two schemes that are also defined in the Unicode
standard, namely @b{Utf-8} and @b{Utf-16}.

Unicode doesn't impose any specific encoding. However, it is most often
associated with one of the Utf encodings. They each have their own
properties and advantages:

@table @b
@item Utf32
This is the simplest of all these encodings. It simply encodes all the
characters on 32 bits (4 bytes). This encodes all the possible characters
in Unicode, and is obviously straightforward to manipulate. However, given
that the first 65535 characters in Unicode are enough to encode all known
languages currently in use, Utf32 is also a waste of space in most cases.

@item Utf16
For the above reason, Utf16 was defined. Most characters are only encoded
on two bytes (which is enough for the first 65535 and most current
characters). In addition, a number of special code points have been
defined, known as @i{surrogate pairs}, that make the encoding of integers
greater than 65535 possible. The integers are then encoded on four bytes.
As a result, Utf16 is thus much more memory-efficient and requires less
space than Utf32 to encode sequences of characters. However, it is also
more complex to decode.

@item Utf8
This is an even more space-efficient encoding, but is also more complex
to decode. More important, it is compatible with the most currently used
simple 8bit encoding.

Utf8 has the following properties:
@itemize
@item Characters 0 to 127 (ASCII) are encoded simply as a single byte.
This means that files and strings which contain only 7-bit ASCII
characters have the same encoding under both ASCII and UTF-8.

@item Characters greater than 127 are encoded as a sequence of several
bytes, each of which has the most significant bit set. Therefore,
no ASCII byte can appear as part of any other character.

@item The first byte of a multibyte sequence that represents a non-ASCII
character is always in the range 0xC0 to 0xFD and it indicates how
many bytes follow for this character. All further bytes in a
multibyte sequence are in the range 0x80 to 0xBF. This allows easy
resynchronization and makes the encoding stateless and robust
against missing bytes.

@item UTF-8 encoded characters may theoretically be up to six bytes
long, however the first 16-bit characters are only up to three bytes
long.

@end itemize

@end table

Note that the encodings above, except for Utf8, have two versions, depending
on the chosen byte order on the machine.

The Ada95 Unicode module provides a set of packages that provide an easy
conversion between all the encoding schemes, as well as basic manipulations
of these byte sequences. These are the @b{Unicode.CES.*} packages.
Currently, four encoding schemes are supported, the three Utf schemes and
the basic 8bit encoding which corresponds to the standard Ada strings.

It also supports some routines to convert from one byte-order to another.

The following examples show a possible use of these packages:

@smallexample
Converting a latin1 string coded on 8 bits to a Utf8 latin2 file
involves the following steps:

   Latin1 string  (bytes associated with code points in Latin1)
     |    "use Unicode.CES.Basic_8bit.To_Utf32"
     v
   Utf32 latin1 string (contains code points in Latin1)
     |    "Convert argument to To_Utf32 should be
     v         Unicode.CCS.Iso_8859_1.Convert"
   Utf32 Unicode string (contains code points in Unicode)
     |    "use Unicode.CES.Utf8.From_Utf32"
     v
   Utf8 Unicode string (contains code points in Unicode)
     |    "Convert argument to From_Utf32 should be
     v         Unicode.CCS.Iso_8859_2.Convert"
   Utf8 Latin2 string (contains code points in Latin2)
@end smallexample

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Misc. functions
@section Misc. functions
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
The package @b{Unicode} contains a series of @code{Is_*} functions,
matching the Unicode standard.

@table @b
@item Is_White_Space
Return True if the character argument is a space character, ie a space,
horizontal tab, line feed or carriage return.

@item Is_Letter
Return True if the character argument is a letter. This includes the
standard English letters, as well as some less current cases defined in the
standard.

@item Is_Base_Char
Return True if the character is a base character, ie a character whose
meaning can be modified with a combining character.

@item Is_Digit
Return True if the character is a digit (numeric character)

@item Is_Combining_Char
Return True if the character is a combining character. Combining characters
are accents or other diacritical marks that are added to the previous
character.

The most important accented characters, like those used in the
orthographies of common languages, have codes of their own in Unicode to
ensure backwards compatibility with older character sets. Accented
characters that have their own code position, but could also be
represented as a pair of another character followed by a combining
character, are known as precomposed characters. Precomposed characters
are available in Unicode for backwards compatibility with older encodings
such as ISO 8859 that had no combining characters. The combining
character mechanism allows to add accents and other diacritical marks to
any character

Note however that your application must provide specific support for
combining characters, at least if you want to represent them visually.

@item Is_Extender
True if Char is an extender character.

@item Is_Ideographic
True if Char is an ideographic character. This is defined only for
Asian languages.

@end table

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node The Input module
@chapter The Input module
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
This module provides a set of packages with a common interface to access
the characters contained in a stream. Various implementations are
provided to access files and manipulate standard Ada strings.

A top-level tagged type is provided that must be extended for the
various streams. It is assumed that the pointer to the current character
in the stream can only go forward, and never backward. As a result, it
is possible to implement this package for sockets or other strings where
it isn't even possible to go backward. This also means that one doesn't
have to provide buffers in such cases, and thus that it is possible to
provide memory-efficient readers.

Two predefined readers are available, namely @code{String_Input} to read
characters from a standard Ada string, and @code{File_Input} to read
characters from a standard text file.

They all provide the following primite operations:

@table @code
@item Open
Although this operation isn't exactly overriden, since its parameters
depend on the type of stream you want to read from, it is nice to
use a standard name for this constructor.

@item Close
This terminates the stream reader and free any associated memory. It
is no longer possible to read from the stream afterwards.

@item Next_Char
Return the next Unicode character in the stream. Note this character
doesn't have to be associated specifically with a single byte, but that
it depends on the encoding chosen for the stream (see the unicode module
documentation for more information).

The next time this function is called, it returns the following character
from the stream.

@item Eof
This function should return True when the reader has already returned the
last character from the stream. Note that it is not guarantee that a second
call to Eof will also return True.
@end table

It is the responsability of this stream reader to correctly call the
decoding functions in the unicode module so as to return one single
valid unicode character. No further processing is done on the result
of @code{Next_Char}. Note that the standard @code{File_Input} and
@code{String_Input} streams can automatically detect the encoding to
use for a file, based on a header read directly from the file.

Based on the first four bytes of the stream (assuming this is valid
XML), they will automatically detect whether the file was encoded as
Utf8, Utf16,... If you are writing your own input streams, consider
adding this automatic detection as well.

However, it is always possible to override the default through a call to
@code{Set_Encoding}. This allows you to specify both the character set
(Latin1, ...) and the character encoding scheme (Utf8,...).

The user is also encouraged to set the identifiers for the stream they
are parsing, through called to @code{Set_System_Id} and
@code{Set_Public_Id}. These are used when reporting error messages.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node The SAX module
@chapter The SAX module
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@menu
* SAX Description::
* SAX Examples::
* SAX Parser::
* SAX Handlers::
* Using SAX::
* Understanding SAX error messages::
@end menu

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node SAX Description
@section Description
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
Parsing XML streams can be done with two different methods. They each
have their pros and cons. Although the simplest, and probably most usual
way to manipulate XML files is to represent them in a tree and manipulate
it through the DOM interface (see next chapter).

The @b{Simple API for XML} is an other method that can be used for parsing.
It is based on a callbacks mechanism, and doesn't store any data in memory
(unless of course you choose to do so in your callbacks). It can thus be
more efficient to use SAX than DOM for some specialized algorithms.
In fact, this whole Ada XML library is based on such a SAX parser, then
creates the DOM tree through callbacks.

Note that this module supports the second release of SAX (SAX2), that fully
supports namespaces as defined in the XML standard.

SAX can also be used in cases where a tree would not be the most efficient
representation for you data. There is no point in building a tree with DOM,
then extracting the data and freeing the tree occupied by the tree. It is
much more efficient to directly store your data through SAX callbacks.

With SAX, you register a number of callback routines that the parser will
call them when certain conditions occur.

This documentation is in no way a full documentation on SAX. Instead,
you should refer to the standard itself, available at
@url{http://sax.sourceforge.net}.

Some of the more useful callbacks are @code{Start_Document},
@code{End_Document}, @code{Start_Element}, @code{End_Element},
@code{Get_Entity} and @code{Characters}. Most of these are
quite self explanatory. The characters callback is called when
characters outside a tag are parsed.

Consider the following XML file:

@smallexample
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<body>
  <h1>Title</h1>
</body>
@end smallexample

The following events would then be generated when this file is parsed:

@smallexample
Start_Document           Start parsing the file
Start_Prefix_Mapping     (handling of namespaces for "xml")
Start_Prefix_Mapping     Parameter is "xmlns"
Processing_Instruction   Parameters are "xml" and "version="1.0""
Start_Element            Parameter is "body"
Characters               Parameter is ASCII.LF & "  "
Start_Element            Parameter is "h1"
Characters               Parameter is "Title"
End_Element              Parameter is "h1"
Characters               Parameter is ASCII.LF & "  "
End_Element              Parameter is "body"
End_Prefix_Mapping       Parameter is "xmlns"
End_Prefix_Mapping       Parameter is "xml"
End_Document             End of parsing
@end smallexample

As you can see, there is a number of events even for a very small file.
However, you can easily choose to ignore the events you don't care
about, for instance the ones related to namespace handling.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node SAX Examples
@section Examples
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
There are several cases where using a SAX parser rather than a DOM
parser would make sense. Here are some examples, although obvisouly
this doesn't include all the possible cases. These examples are taken
from the documentation of libxml, a GPL C toolkit for manipulating XML files.

@itemize @bullet
@item Using XML files as a database

One of the common usage for XML files is to use them as a kind of
basic database, They obviously provide a strongly structured format,
and you could for instance store a series of numbers with the following
format.

@smallexample
<array> <value>1</value> <value>2</value> ....</array>
@end smallexample

In this case, rather than reading this file into a tree, it would obviously
be easier to manipulate it through a SAX parser, that would directly create
a standard Ada array while reading the values.

This can be extended to much more complex cases that would map to Ada
records for instance.

@item Large repetitive XML files

Sometimes we have XML files with many subtrees of the same format
describing different things. An example of this is an index file for a
documentation similar to this one. This contains a lot (maybe thousands)
of similar entries, each containing for instance the name of the symbol
and a list of locations.

If the user is looking for a specific entry, there is no point in loading
the whole file in memory and then traverse the resulting tree. The memory
usage increases very fast with the size of the file, and this might even
be unfeasible for a 35 megabytes file.

@item Simple XML files

Even for simple XML files, it might make sense to use a SAX parser. For
instance, if there are some known constraints in the input file, say
there are no attributes for elements, you can save quite a lot of memory,
and maybe time, by rebuilding your own tree rather than using the full
DOM tree.

@end itemize

However, there are also a number of drawbacks to using SAX:

@itemize @bullet
@item SAX parsers generally require you to write a little bit more code than
 the DOM interface
@item There is no easy way to write the XML data back to a file, unless you
 build your own internal tree to save the XML.
 As a result, SAX is probably not the best interface if you want to load,
 modify and dump back an XML file.

 Note however than in this Ada implementation, the DOM tree is built through
 a set of SAX callbacks anyway, so you do not lose any power or speed by using
 DOM instead of SAX.
@end itemize

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node SAX Parser
@section The SAX parser
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
The basic type in the SAX module is the @b{SAX.Readers} package. It
defines a tagged type, called @code{Reader}, that represents the SAX
parser itself.

Several features are define in the SAX standard for the parsers. They
indicate which behavior can be expected from the parser. The package
@code{SAX.Readers} defines a number of constant strings for each of
these features. Some of these features are read-only, whereas others can
be modified by the user to adapt the parser. See the @code{Set_Feature}
and @code{Get_Feature} subprograms for how to manipulate them.

The main primitive operation for the parser is @code{Parse}. It takes
an input stream for argument, associated with some XML data, and then
parses it and calls the appropriate callbacks. It returns once there are
no more characters left in the stream.

Several other primitive subprograms are defined for the parser, that are
called the @b{callbacks}. They get called automatically by the @code{Parse}
procedure when some events are seen.

As a result, you should always override at least some of these subprogram
to get something done. The default implementation for these is to do nothing,
exception for the error handler that raises Ada exceptions appropriately.

An example of such an implementation of a SAX parser is available in the
DOM module, and it creates a tree in memory. As you will see if you look at
the code, the callbacks are actually very short.

Note that internally, all the strings are encoded with a unique character
encoding scheme, that is defined in the file @file{sax-encodings.ads}. The input
stream is converted on the fly to this internal encoding, and all the
subprograms from then on will receive and pass parameters with this new
encoding. You can of course freely change the encoding defined in the file
@file{sax-encodings.ads}.

The encoding used for the input stream is either automatically
detected by the stream itself (@pxref{The Input module}), or by parsing the
@smallexample
   <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' ?>
@end smallexample
processing instruction at the beginning of the document. The list of
supported encodings is the same as for the Unicode module (@pxref{The
Unicode module}).

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node SAX Handlers
@section The SAX handlers
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
We do not intend to document the whole set of possible callbacks associated
with a SAX parser. These are all fully documented in the file
@file{sax-readers.ads}.

here is a list of the most frequently used callbacks, that you will
probably need to override in most of your applications.

@table @code
@item Start_Document
This callback, that doesn't receive any parameter, is called once, just before
parsing the document. It should generally be used to initialize internal
data needed later on. It is also garanteed to be called only once per input
stream.

@item End_Document
This one is the reverse of the previous one, and will also be called only
once per input stream. It should be used to release the memory you have
allocated in Start_Document.

@item Start_Element
This callback is called every time the parser encounters the start of an
element in the XML file. It is passed the name of the element, as well as
the relevant namespace information. The attributes defined in this element
are also passed as a list. Thus, you get all the required information for
this element in a single function call.

@item End_Element
This is the opposite of the previous callback, and will be called once per
element. Calls to @code{Start_Element} and @code{End_Element} are garanteed
to be properly nested (ie you can't see the end of an element before seeing
the end of all its nested children.

@item Characters and Ignore_Whitespace
This procedure will be called every time some character not part of an
element declaration are encounted. The characters themselves are passed as
an argument to the callback. Note that the white spaces (and tabulations)
are reported separately in the Ignorable_Spaces callback in case the
XML attribute @code{xml:space} was set to something else than @code{preserve}
for this element.

@end table

You should compile and run the @file{testsax} executable found in this
module to visualize the SAX events that are generated for a given XML file.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Using SAX
@section Using SAX
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
This section will guide you through the creation of a small SAX application.
This application will read an XML file, assumed to be a configuration file,
and setup some preferences according to the contents of the file.

The XML file is the following:

@smallexample
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<preferences>
   <pref name="pref1">Value1</pref>
   <pref name="pref2">Value2</pref>
</preferences>
@end smallexample

This is a very simple example which doesn't use namespaces, and has a very
limited nesting of nodes. However, that should help demonstrate the basics
of using SAX.

@subsection Parsing the file
@noindent
The first thing to do is to declare a parser, and parse the file. No callback
is put in place in this first version, and as a result nothing happens.

The main program is the following:

@smallexample
@include sax/saxexample_main.adb
@end smallexample

A separate package is provided that contain our implementation of an XML
parser

@smallexample
with Sax.Readers;

package SaxExample is

   type Reader is new Sax.Readers.Reader with null record;

end SaxExample;
@end smallexample

There are two steps in setting up an XML parser:

@itemize @bullet
@item Create an input stream

This input stream is in charge of providing the XML input to the parser.
Several input streams are provided by XML/Ada, including the one we use in
this example to read the XML data from a file on the disk. The file is
called @file{pref.xml}.

It has two properties, that should generally be set: the public id will be
used by XML/Ada in its error message to reference locations in that file; the
system id should be the location of the file on the system. It is used to
resolve relative paths found in the XML document.

@item Setup the parser

The behavior of an XML parser can be changed in several ways by activating
or deactivating some features. In the example above, we have specified that
the XML document doesn't contain namespaces, and that we do not intend to
validate the XML file against a grammar.

@end itemize

Once the two steps above are done, we can simply call the procedure
@code{Parse} to perform the actual parsing. Since we are using SAX, XML/Ada
will call the primitive operations of @code{My_Reader}, which, so far,
are inherited form the default ones provided by XML, and do nothing.

@subsection Reacting to events
@noindent
We are now going to enhance the example a little, and make it react to the
contents of the XML file.

We are only interested in two particular type of events, which are the
opening and closing of an XML tag, and finding the value of each preference.

The way to react to these events is to override some of the primitive
subprograms in the package @file{saxexample.ads} as follows:

@smallexample
@include sax/saxexample.ads
@end smallexample

The primitive operations will be called automatically when the
corresponding events are detected in the XML file.

The implementation for these subprograms is detailed below.

@subsubsection Start of XML tags
@noindent
When an XML tag is started, we need to check whether it corresponds to the
definition of a preference value. If that is the case, we get the value of
the @code{name} attribute, which specifies the name of a preference.

@smallexample
with Unicode.CES;    use Unicode.CES;
with Sax.Attributes; use Sax.Attributes;
with Ada.Text_IO;    use Ada.Text_IO;

package body SaxExample is

   procedure Start_Element
     (Handler       : in out Reader;
      Namespace_URI : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence := "";
      Local_Name    : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence := "";
      Qname         : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence := "";
      Atts          : Sax.Attributes.Attributes'Class)
   is
   begin
      Handler.Current_Pref  := Null_Unbounded_String;
      Handler.Current_Value := Null_Unbounded_String;

      if Local_Name = "pref" then
         Handler.Current_Pref :=
           To_Unbounded_String (Get_Value (Atts, "name"));
      end if;
   end Start_Element;
@end smallexample

@subsubsection Characters
@noindent
XML/Ada will report the textual contents of an XML tag through one or more
calls to the @code{Characters} primitive operation. An XML parser is free to
divide the contents into as many calls to @code{Characters} as it needs, and
we must be prepared to handle this properly. Therefore, we concatenate the
characters with the current value.

@smallexample
   procedure Characters
     (Handler : in out Reader;
      Ch      : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence) is
   begin
      if Handler.Current_Pref /= Null_Unbounded_String then
         Handler.Current_Value := Handler.Current_Value & Ch;
      end if;
   end Characters;
@end smallexample

@subsubsection End of tag
@noindent
Once we meet the end of a tag, we know there will be no more addition to
the value, and we can now set the value of the preference. In this example,
we simply display the value on the standard output.

@smallexample
   procedure End_Element
     (Handler : in out Reader;
      Namespace_URI : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence := "";
      Local_Name    : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence := "";
      Qname         : Unicode.CES.Byte_Sequence := "")
   is
   begin
      if Local_Name = "pref" then
         Put_Line ("Value for """ & To_String (Handler.Current_Pref)
                   & """ is " & To_String (Handler.Current_Value));
      end if;
   end End_Element;
@end smallexample

In a real application, we would need to handle error cases in the
XML file. Thankfully, most of the work is already done by XML/Ada, and
the errors will be reported as calls to the primitive operation
@code{Fatal_Error}, which by default raises an exception.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Understanding SAX error messages
@section Understanding SAX error messages
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@noindent
XML/Ada error messages try to be as explicit as possible. They are not,
however, meant to be understood by someone who doesn't know XML.

In addition to the location of the error (line and column in the file),
they might contain one of the following abbreviations:

@itemize @bullet
@item @code{[WF]}
@cindex WF

This abbreviation indicates that the error message is related to a
well-formedness issue, as defined in the XML standard. Basically, the
structure of the XML document is invalid, for instance because an
open tag has never been closed. Some of the error messages also indicate
a more precise section in the XML standard.

@item @code{[VC]}
@cindex VC
@cindex DTD

This abbreviation indicates that the error message is related to an
unsatisfied validity-constraint, as defined in the XML standard. The XML
document is well formed, although it doesn't match the semantic rules
that the grammar defines. For instance, if you are trying to validate an
XML document against a DTD, the document must contain a DTD that defines the
name of the root element.

@end itemize


@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node The DOM module
@chapter The DOM module
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
DOM is another standard associated with XML, in which the XML stream is
represented as a tree in memory. This tree can be manipulated at will, to
add new nodes, remove existing nodes, change attributes,...

Since it contains the whole XML information, it can then in turn be dump to a
stream.

As an example, most modern web browsers provide a DOM interface to the
document currently loaded in the browser. Using javascript, one can thus
modify dynamically the document. The calls to do so are similar to the ones
provided by XML/Ada for manipulating a DOM tree, and all are defined in the
DOM standard.

The W3C commitee (@url{http://www.w3c.org}) has defined several version of
the DOM, each building on the previous one and adding several enhancements.

XML/Ada currently supports the second revision of DOM (DOM 2.0), which
mostly adds namespaces over the first revision. The third revision is not
supported at this point, and it adds support for loading and saving XML
streams in a standardized fashion.

Although it doesn't support DOM 3.0, XML/Ada provides subprograms for doing
similar things.

Only the Core module of the DOM standard is currently implemented, other
modules will follow.

Note that the @file{encodings.ads} file specifies the encoding to use to store
the tree in memory. Full compatibility with the XML standard requires that
this be UTF16, however, it is generally much more memory-efficient for European
languages to use UTF8. You can freely change this and recompile.

@menu
* Using DOM::
@end menu

@c ------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Using DOM
@section Using DOM
@c ------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
In XML/Ada, the DOM tree is build through a special implementation of a
SAX parser, provided in the @code{DOM.Readers} package.

Using DOM to read an XML document is similar to using SAX: one must setup
an input stream, then parse the document and get the tree. This is done
with a code similar to the following:

@smallexample
@include dom/domexample.adb
@end smallexample

This code is almost exactly the same as the code that was used when
demonstrating the use of SAX (@pxref{Using SAX}).

The main two differences are:

@itemize @bullet
@item We no longer need to define our own XML reader, and we simply use the
 one provided in @code{DOM.Readers}.
@item We therefore do not add our own callbacks to react to the XML events.
 Instead, the last instruction of the program gets a handle on the tree that
 was created in memory.
@end itemize

The tree can now be manipulated to get access to the value stored.
If we want to implement the same thing we did for SAX, the code would look
like:

@smallexample
@include dom/domexample2.adb
@end smallexample

The code is much simpler than with SAX, since most of the work is done
internally by XML/Ada. In particular, for SAX we had to take into account
the fact that the textual contents of a node could be reported in several
events. For DOM, the tree is initially normalized, ie all text nodes are
collapsed together when possible.

This added simplicity has one drawback, which is the amount of memory
required to represent even a simple tree.

XML/Ada optimizes the memory necessary to represent a tree by sharing
the strings as much as possible (this is under control of constants at
the beginning of @file{dom-core.ads}). Still, DOM requires a significant
amount of information to be kept for each node.

For really big XML streams, it might prove impossible to keep the whole
tree in memory, in which case ad hoc storage might be implemented through
the use of a SAX parser. The implementation of @code{dom-readers.adb} will
prove helpful in creating such a parser.


@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node The XML_GTK module
@chapter The XML_GTK module
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent

GTK/Ada is a library that can be used to build graphical user interfaces.
It is available either from AdaCore directly, which should be the prefered
version if you are using it in a commercial project, or directly from
@url{http://libre.act-europe.fr} for university projects.

You should first install GTK/Ada, and change the @code{ADA_PROJECT_PATH}
environment variable so that it includes the directory containing
@file{gtkada.gpr}.

Then configure, compile and install XML/Ada. This will install an extra
module and library called @file{xml_gtk} and @file{libxml_gtk.so}.

This library allows you to use XML/Ada as the parser, while still generating
an XML tree compatible with the one in @file{glib-xml.ads}. This can be
used for instance in current applications that used GtkAda's lightweight
parser, to use an XML parser which will accept a broader range of XML
files, and will provide better error messages.

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node The Schema module
@chapter The Schema module
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@menu
* XML Grammars::
* XML Schema Syntax::
* Connecting XML documents and schemas::
* Validating documents with SAX::
@end menu

@c --------------------------------------------------------------------
@node XML Grammars
@section XML Grammars
@c --------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
There are several steps that applications must go through when they have to use
XML files:

@itemize @bullet
 @item Make sure the XML file is well-formed.

       This is a basic step where we ensure that XML tags are correctly nested,
       that closing tags have the same names as the matching opening tags,
       that attribute values are quoted,@dots{}. This corresponds to a
       syntactic parser in a compiler.

       This step does not depend on the application domain. One file that is
       well-formed will always be so, no matter in what context you use it.


 @item Make sure the contents of the XML file is semantically valid.

       Depending on the application domain, we must ensure that the content of
       the file makes sense. This step is highly application dependent, and a
       file that is usable in one application might not be usable in another
       one.

       This is the phase in which the application needs to check whether a
       given XML file has all its required attributes, whether the children of
       an XML tag are the expected ones, whether the type of the attributes is
       valid,@dots{}.

 @item Use the XML file in the application.

       This is done through the already-described SAX or DOM parsers

@end itemize

The first phase is mandatory, and necessarily enforced by XML/Ada. You will not
be able to access the contents of the XML file if it isn't well-formed.

The second phase is provided by the Schema module in XML/Ada. Although such
constraints can be checked at the application level, with ad hoc
code, it is generally easier to maintain a separate file that describes the
valid semantic contents of the file, that maintain specific code when the
semantic changes. It is also difficult not to forget special cases when doing
the validating through a set of @code{if} statements in the Ada core.

XML provides two ways to describe additional constraints that a file
must satisfy in order to be considered as valid.

@itemize @bullet

 @item DTD

       The Document Type Description is the original way to do this. They come
       directly from the ancestor of XML, SGML. All XML parsers must parse the
       DTD, and report events if the user is using SAX. However, not all
       parsers are able to validate the document against a DTD (XML/Ada
       doesn't).

       Their use tend to greatly diminish. Among their limitation are a limit
       capability to express constraints on the order of tag children, the fact
       they the DTD themselves are written in a separate language totally
       different from XML, and that users must learn as a result.

 @item XML Schema

       The XML schemas are replacing the DTDs. They are written in XML, and
       provide an extensive capability to describe what the XML document should
       look like. In fact, almost all Ada types can be described in an XML
       schema, including range constraints, arrays, records, type inheritance,
       abstract types,@dots{}.

       It is for instance possible to indicate that the value of a preference,
       in our example, must be a string of length 6. Any other length will
       result in a validation error.

@end itemize

@c ------------------------------------------------------------------
@node XML Schema Syntax
@section XML Schema Syntax
@c ------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
The Schema modules provides subprograms and types to parse an XML schema
and validate an XML document with this schema.

This document does not provide a full documentation on the format of XML
Schemas. This is extensive, has several obscure features, which, although
supported by XML/Ada, are of little use in most pratical uses. We refer the
reader to the first part of the XML Schema specification, which is designed as
a tutorial (@url{http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-0/}).

The typical extension for a schema file is @file{.xsd}.

A schema file must be a valid XML file, and thus start with the usual
@code{<?xml version="1.0" ?>} line. The root node must be named @code{schema},
and belong to the namespace (@url{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema/}). The
handling of namespaces is fairly powerful, but also complex. A given XML
document might have nodes belonging to several namespaces, and thus several
schema files might have to be loaded, each defining one of the namespaces.

In the following simple example, we will not define our schema for a specific
namespace, and thus no special attribute is needed for the root node.
Thus, our document will be organized as:

@smallexample
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    ... rest of the description goes here ...
</xsd:schema>
@end smallexample



An XML schema does not enforce a specific root node in the XML documents it
validates. However, it must define all the valid elements that can be used in
the XML file. This is done through the @code{<element>} tag, which takes
one mandatory attribute, the name of the element we are defining.

The contents of the element is then defined in one of two ways:

@itemize @bullet

 @item Through a @code{type} attribute.

       Schemas come with a number of predefined simple types. A simple type is
       such that an element of that type accepts no child node, and that its
       contents must satisfy additional constraints (be an integer, a date,
       @dots{}).

       Among the predefined simple type (which are all defined in the
       namespace @url{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema/}), one can find:
       @code{string}, @code{integer}, @code{byte}, @code{date}, @code{time},
       @code{dateTime}, @code{boolean},@dots{}

       If no additional constraint should be enforced on this simple type when
       applied to the element, the type of the element is given through a
       @code{type} attribute, as in:

@smallexample
 <xsd:element name="tag1" type="xsd:string"  />
 <xsd:element name="tag2" type="xsd:boolean" />
@end smallexample

       which would accept the following XML files

@smallexample
 <tag1>Any string is valid here</tag1>
and
 <tag2>true</tag2>
@end smallexample

       but not

@smallexample
  <tag2>String</tag2>
@end smallexample

        As will be described later, it is possible to create new types in XML
        schema, which are created with a name. Such new types can also be
        associated with the element through the @code{type} attribute.

 @item Through an inline type definition

       If the element must accept child elements, or if a further constraint
       needs to be enforced on the list of valid values, one must create the
       type. As mentioned above, this can be done by creating a type 
       separately and referencing it by name, or through an inline type 
       definition.

       The syntax is mostly the same in both cases. Schemas distinguish between
       the notion of simple types (that accept no child element) and
       complex types (that accept child elements, and possibly text value).

       To define a simple type, based on string, but that only allows a limited
       set of value (similar to an Ada enumeration), one would create a
       restriction of the standard string type, as in:

@smallexample
 <xsd:element name="tag3">
  <xsd:simpleType>
    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string">
      <xsd:enumeration value="value1" />
      <xsd:enumeration value="value2" />
    </xsd:restriction>
  </xsd:simpleType>
 </xsd:element>
@end smallexample

       Similarly, we could create an integer type whose valid range of values
       is between 10 and 20, as in:

@smallexample
 <xsd:element name="tag4">
  <xsd:simpleType>
    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:byte">
      <xsd:minInclusive value="10" />
      <xsd:maxInclusive value="20" />
    </xsd:restriction>
  </xsd:simpleType>
 </xsd:element>
@end smallexample

        Complex types allow elements to have child nodes, as well as
        attributes. The list of valid attributes is created by a set of
        @code{<xsd:attribute>} tags, and the list of valid child nodes is
        generally defined either through a @code{<xsd:choice>} or a
        @code{<xsd:sequence>} node (although it is possible to indicate that
        any child node is authorized, among other things).

        @code{<xsd:choice>} indicate the children can appear in any order,
        whereas @code{<xsd:sequence>} enforces a specific order on children.

        In both cases, extra attributes can be specified to indicate the
        number of times the sequence or choice itself can be repeated, or that
        each child node can appear.

        For instance, we can indicate that @code{tag5} accepts between 1 and
        4 child nodes, chosen among @code{tag6} and @code{tag7}, but that the
        latter, if present, can only appear once. In addition, tag5 accepts one
        optional attribute. Note that the type of tag6 and tag7 is here
        specified through a @code{type} attribute, although it could in turn be
        defined inline.

@smallexample
 <xsd:element name="tag5">
   <xsd:complexType>
     <xsd:choice>
       <xsd:element name="tag6" type="xsd:string"
                    minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="3/>
       <xsd:element name="tag7" type="xsd:string" maxOccurs="1" />
     </xsd:choice>
     <xsd:attribute name="attr" type="xsd:boolean" use="optional" />
   </xsd:complexType>
 </xsd:element>
@end smallexample

         In the example above, if @code{tag6} was defined elsewhere in the
         schema, we could use a reference to it, instead of duplicating its
         type definition, as in:

@smallexample
  <xsd:element ref="tag6" />
@end smallexample

         If you need an element with no child element (just a string value),
         but that accepts attributes, this also must be defined through a
         complex type, as in:

@smallexample
 <xsd:element name="tag8" />
   <xsd:complexType>
     <xsd:simpleContent>
       <xsd:extension base="xsd:string">
          <xsd:attribute name="attr" type="xsd:boolean" />
       </xsd:extension>
     </xsd:simpleContent>
   </xsd:complexType>
 </xsd:element>
@end smallexample

@end itemize

As mentioned before, instead of defining inline types, we could explicitly
declare them, and reference them in the element declaration later on.

@smallexample
 <xsd:simpleType name="string_of_length_10">
   <xsd:restriction base="xsd:string" />
     <xsd:length value="10"/>
   </xsd:restriction>
 </xsd:simpleType>
 <xsd:element name="tag9" type="string_of_length_10" />
@end smallexample

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Connecting XML documents and schemas
@section Connecting XML documents and schemas
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
There are several ways that XML/Ada uses to find what schema to use when
validating a file.

@itemize @bullet
 @item Manually creating the grammar.

       The schema module contains the package @code{Schema.Validators} which
       allows you to create a grammar by hand. It is very low-level, and it is
       likely that you will never need to use it. It is used internally mostly,
       and when creating the schema which is used to validate schema files
       themselves.

  @item Explicitly parsing a schema file

       Parsing a schema file can be done through a call to parse for a reader
       derived from @code{Schema.Schema_Readers.Schema_reader}.  As usual, you
       call @code{Parse}, and pass it an input source. As output, you get
       access to a grammar, that can then be given to another instance of a
       @code{Schema.Readers.Validating_Reader}.

       This technique will generally be used when you need to validate several
       XML files with the same grammar: you parse the grammar only once, and
       then reuse its instance, instead of reparsing the @file{.xsd} file every
       time.

@smallexample
 @b{with} Schema.Schema_Readers, Schema.Validators, Input_Sources.File;
 @b{use}  Schema.Schema_Readers, Schema.Validators, Input_Sources.File;
 @b{with} Schema.Schema_Grammar;  @b{use}  Schema.Schema_Grammar;
 @b{declare}
    Grammar : XML_Grammar;
    Schema  : Schema_Reader;
    Read    : File_Input;
 @b{begin}
      Open ("file.xsd", Read);
      Set_Validating_Grammar (Schema, Create_Schema_For_Schema);
      Parse (Schema, Read);
      Close (Read);
      Grammar := Get_Created_Grammar (Schema);
 @b{end;}
@end smallexample

      In the example above, the schema file itself is validated against the
      official schema for schema files. This slows down the process slightly,
      obviously, and is in fact not needed if you know that the file is valid.
      In this case, you can comment out the line containing the call to
      @code{Set_Validating_Grammar}.

      The resulting grammar object is in fact a collection of parsed schema
      files, each associated with its own namespace. It can be kept as long as
      you need it in your application, or freed with a call to @code{Free} to
      deallocate the associated memory.

      Every time you parse an XML file later on, you must associated the
      Grammar with the parser.

@smallexample
 @b{declare}
    Read      : File_Input;
    My_Reader : Validating_Reader;
 @b{begin}
    Set_Validating_Grammar (My_Reader, Grammar);
    Set_Feature (My_Reader, Schema_Validation_Feature, True);
    Open (Xml_File.all, Read);
    Parse (My_Reader, Read);
    Close (Read);
 @b{end};
@end smallexample

 @item Implicitly parsing the schema

       Two special attributes, defined in the Schema standard, can be used to
       indicate, in an XML document itself, that it should be validated with
       a specific schema.

       These attributes are both defined in a special namespace,
       @url{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance}.

       @itemize -
         @item @code{xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation}

               The value of this attribute is the name of a file that contains
               the schema to use for elements that are not associated with a
               specific namespace.

         @item @code{xsi:schemaLocation}

               This attribute is a list of strings, alternatively the prefix of
               a namespace and the name of an xsd file to use for that
               namespace. For instance, @code{"ns1 file1.xsd ns2 file2.xsd"}.
       @end itemize

       When it encounters any of these two attributes, XML/Ada will
       automatically parse the corresponding schema files, and use the result
       to validate the file.
@end itemize

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Validating documents with SAX
@section Validating documents with SAX
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent
XML/Ada is quite unique in the category of XML parsers, since it allows
the validation of XML files when you are using an event-based parser with SAX.
Most other XML parsers only work on DOM trees.

Basing the validation on SAX is more efficient, since there is no need to read
the whole XML stream (or even the grammar) in memory before starting the
validation, and errors can be reported immediatly.

It also requires less memory to run, and thus can validate large XML
documents.

It also means that even if you are using SAX, and not DOM, you still have
access to the validation features.

Validating a XML document while parsing it is basically done the same as when
using SAX itself. Instead of inheriting from @code{Sax.Readers.Reader}, your
tagged type must inherit from @code{Schema.Readers.Validating_Reader}.

As usual, you can still override the predefined primitive operations like
@code{Start_Element}, @code{End_Element}, @dots{}

Note the activation of the @code{Schema_Validation_Feature} feature,
without which no validation takes place.

@smallexample
@b{with} Sax.Readers;        @b{use} Sax.Readers;
@b{with} Schema.Readers;     @b{use} Schema.Readers;
@b{with} Input_Sources.File; @b{use} Input_Sources.File;

@b{procedure} SchemaExample @b{is}
   Input : File_Input;
   My_Reader : Validating_Reader;
@b{begin}
   Set_Public_Id (Input, "Preferences file");
   Open ("pref.xml", Input);

   Set_Feature (My_Reader, Schema_Validation_Feature, True);
   Parse (My_Reader, Input);

   Close (Input);
@b{end} SchemaExample;
@end smallexample

@c -------------------------------------------------------------------
@node Using the library
@chapter Using the library
@c -------------------------------------------------------------------

@noindent

XML/Ada is a library. When compiling an application that uses it, you
thus need to specify where the spec files are to be found, as well
as where the libraries are installed.

There are several ways to do it:

@itemize @bullet

@cindex xmlada-config
@item The simplest is to use the @command{xmlada-config} script, and let it
   provide the list of switches for @command{gnatmake}. This is more
   convenient on Unix systems, where you can simply compile your application
   with

@smallexample
gnatmake main.adb `xmlada-config`
@end smallexample

   Note the use of backticks. This means that @command{xmlada-config} is
   first executed, and then the command line is replaced with the output of
   the script, thus finally executing something like:

@smallexample
gnatmake main.adb -Iprefix/include/xmlada -largs -Lprefix/lib \
  -lxmlada_input_sources -lxmlada_sax -lxmlada_unicode -lxmlada_dom
@end smallexample

   Unfortunately, this behavior is not available on Windows (unless of course
   you use a Unix shell). The simplest in that case is to create a
   @file{Makefile}, to be used with the @command{make} command, and copy-paste
   the output of @command{xmlada-config} into it.

   @command{xmlada-config} has several switches that might be useful:

   @enumerate

   @item @option{--sax}: If you this flag, your application will not be
      linked against the DOM module. This might save some space, particularly
      if linking statically.

   @item @option{--static}: Return the list of flags to use to link your
      application statically against Xml/Ada. Your application is then
      standalone, and you don't need to distribute XMl/Ada at the same time.

   @item @option{--static_sax}: Combines both of the above flags.

   @end enumerate

   If you are working on a big project, particularly one that includes
   sources in languages other than Ada, you generally have to run the three
   steps of the compilation process separately (compile, bind and then link).
   @command{xmlada-config} can also be used, provided you use one of the
   following switches:

   @enumerate

   @item @option{--cflags}: This returns the compiler flags only, to be used
       for instance with @command{gcc}.

   @item @option{--libs}: This returns the linker flags only, to be used for
       instance with @command{gnatlink}.

   @end enumerate

   This @command{xmlada-config} method doesn't provide access to the
   @file{xml_gtk} module, which is only available when using project files
   (see below).

@cindex project files
@cindex xmlada.gpr
@item The preferred method, however, is to use the GNAT project files.
   See the GNAT user's guide for more information on the project files and
   how to create them for your application.

   Basically, a project file contains the description of your build
   environment (source directories, object directories, libraries,@dots{}).

   The very simple case is when you have all your sources in the same
   directory (say @file{src/}), and the object files are all generated in the
   @file{obj/} directory.

   In this case, your project file would look like:

   @smallexample
   with "xmlada";
   project Default is
      for Source_Dirs use ("src/");
      for Object_Dir use "obj/";
   end Default;
   @end smallexample

   and you build your application with

   @smallexample
   gnatmake -Pdefault main.adb
   @end smallexample

   Note in the project file the first line, which indicates that your
   application requires XML/Ada to build. This will automatically set the
   appropriate compiler and linker switches to use XML/Ada. Your application
   will be linker against all modules of XML/Ada (DOM, SAX, ...).

   If your application doesn't use DOM, you can replace the first line with
   something like:

   @smallexample
   with "xmlada_sax";
   @end smallexample

   which will reduce the number of libraries that your application is
   linked with.

   WHen you are using project files, you need to let GNAT know where to find
   the project files. This is done by setting the @code{ADA_PROJECT_PATH}
   environment variable, by adding to it the installation directory of
   XML/Ada, ie the one that contains xmlada.gpr

   If the installation prefix is the same as your GNAT installation, and you
   are using GNAT more recent than 5.03a, then it will automatically find
   XML/Ada's project files.

   Check the @file{dom/test} directory in the XML/Ada package, which contains
   both code examples and project files that you can use as a basic for your
   own code.
@end itemize

Whatever method you used to build your application, you might have to change,
at least one UNIX systems, the environment variable @code{LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
so that it contains the @file{lib/} directory in the XML/Ada installation,
so that the dynamic libraries are correctly found.

This is not needed if you build XML/Ada as a static directory.

@bye
