#41490 [Opn]: xsd:choice with maxOccurs="unbounded" does not preserve element order

ID: 41490 Updated by: dmitry@php.net Reported By: simon at highlyillogical dot org Status: Open -Bug Type: SOAP related +Bug Type: Documentation problem Operating System: Windows/Linux PHP Version: 5.2.2 Assigned To: dmitry New Comment: There is no way to automatic preserve order of objects without breaking compatibility, however as I showed, it is possible to do this with sereral lines of additional code. So nothing to fix (except documentation). Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2007-06-28 08:31:40] simon at highlyillogical dot org Yeah, I'm happy to write my own serialisers and deserialisers, to work around the problem. (Although it's time consuming -- I don't have to do this in other languages) That 'typemap' trick doesn't seem to be documented anywhere or I'd have gone with it straight away. I haven't made it work in practice yet, but it looks like it should work. I can implement my own complex classes and ensure that I (de)serialize everything in the correct order. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2007-06-26 01:00:01] php-bugs at lists dot php dot net No feedback was provided for this bug for over a week, so it is being suspended automatically. If you are able to provide the information that was originally requested, please do so and change the status of the bug back to "Open". ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2007-06-18 14:57:20] dmitry@php.net You can access element order using the following trick. <?php $wsdl = "http://zx81.highlyillogical.org/~simon/phpbugtest/phpbugtest.wsdl"; $options=Array( 'typemap' => array(array("type_ns" => "http://zx81.highlyillogical.org/~simon/phpbugtest", "type_name" => "sentence", "from_xml" => "sentence_from_xml")) ); function sentence_from_xml($x) { return simplexml_load_string($x); } $client = new SoapClient($wsdl, $options) ; $result = $client->bugtest(); var_dump($result); foreach ($result as $key => $val) { echo $key . ":" . (string)$val . "\n"; } Actual result: -------------- object(SimpleXMLElement)#2 (3) { ["other"]=> array(3) { [0]=> string(3) "The" [1]=> string(2) "is" [2]=> string(4) "with" } ["noun"]=> array(2) { [0]=> string(3) "cat" [1]=> string(6) "string" } ["verb"]=> string(7) "playing" } other:The noun:cat other:is verb:playing other:with noun:string ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2007-06-14 09:58:27] simon at highlyillogical dot org In practice, that's not possible. The 'words' example is a much-simplified example of what I want to happen. In reality my document is a sequence of objects of different types, but must remain in the correct order. Think of an XHTML document. It's valid XML and could theoretically be used in a similar way. However, in such a document you've got no idea whether a <p> element, a <ul> element, a <div>, a <form>, or a <table> is coming next... But they do have to have the order retained. If you globbed all of the paragraps together, with all of the unordered lists after, you'd end up with something that didn't make much sense. In fact, if you look at the schema for XHTML (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1-schema/#xhtml1-strict) you can see that it uses exactly this mechanism (xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded") in order to implement this. (See the "Block" complexType) -- So, if you want to parse soap messages with an XHTML payload correctly, a solution to this problem needs to be found. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2007-06-14 07:27:11] dmitry@php.net I don's see a way to fix this. PHP is not able to keep several elemtns with the same names in object or array. So it is not possible to keep order of elements with different names. You can probaly change WSDL to have a sequence of 'words', where each word is an element defined as extension of type 'string' with 'part_of_speach' attribute. So you'll have to pass something like this: <sentence> <word part_of_speach="other">The</word> <word part_of_speach="noun">cat</word> <word part_of_speach="other">is</word> <word part_of_speach="verb">playing</word> <word part_of_speach="other">with</word> <word part_of_speach="noun">string</word> </sentence> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/41490 -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=41490&edit=1