Editorial: Growing Support for Asynchronous Transactions

It's always exciting to see a prediction come true. . .especially when its one of your own.  For a number of years now it has been obvious that the simple synchronous web services taught in books and college courses were never going to be sufficient enough to support the highly complex transactions required in the real world.  In particular, transactions which require two-phase validation, such as those that leverage Schematron in addition to simple XML Schema validation.

It appears that others are leaning towards agreeing with this same premise.  Microsoft is now publishing its Visual Studio Async in order to better handle these sorts of highly complex transactions which require higher network latency than your traditional synchronous request/response web service.  Infoworld has a good article here that describes Microsoft's adoption of this new trend.

While not endorsing any specific platform, Microsoft's development tools have historically been a great indicator of market trends.  This latest addition proves to be a good sign that the industry is headed towards better support of this highly complex transaction processing world in which we live.

XSLT: Transform XML into nc:ContactInformation Structure

This is a short post to show how to leverage XSLT to convert a simple and generic XML file into NIEM-conformant XML as it pertains to the nc:ContactInformation block. 

This is a very common situation where a "non-NIEM" data stream is received and needs to be converted to a conformant structure.  Take the following sample non-NIEM XML instance:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>     
<SomeBatchOfStuff>
   <Person>
       <Name>John Doe</Name>
       <PhoneNumber>212-111-2222</PhoneNumber>
   </Person>
   <Person>
       <Name>Sally Smith</Name>
       <PhoneNumber>212-333-4444</PhoneNumber>
   </Person>
</SomeBatchOfStuff>

If this very logical structure needed to be converted into nc:Person and nc:ContactInformatoin elements (with an nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation object to link the two together), the following XSLT could be used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>     
<xsl:stylesheet  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:ns0="SomeNonConformantDocumentNamespace" version="1.0" exclude-result-prefixes="xs">
    <xsl:output method="xml" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:variable name="var1_instance_InputSchema" select="."/>
        <MyNIEMConformantDocument xmlns="MyNIEMDocumentNamespace" xmlns:i="http://niem.gov/niem/appinfo/2.0" xmlns:nc="http://niem.gov/niem/niem-core/2.0" xmlns:niem-xsd="http://niem.gov/niem/proxy/xsd/2.0" xmlns:s="http://niem.gov/niem/structures/2.0">
            <!-- Loop through the Persons and create an NIEM Conformant Person -->
            <xsl:for-each select="$var1_instance_InputSchema/SomeBatchOfStuff/Person">
                <xsl:variable name="NonConformantPerson" select="."/>
                <nc:Person>
                    <xsl:attribute name="s:id">
                        <xsl:value-of select="generate-id(.)"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    <nc:PersonName>
                        <xsl:for-each select="$NonConformantPerson/Name">
                            <nc:PersonFullName>
                                <xsl:value-of select="string(.)"/>
                            </nc:PersonFullName>
                        </xsl:for-each>
                    </nc:PersonName>
                </nc:Person>
            </xsl:for-each>
            
            <!-- Loop through the phone numbers and create a NIEM Conformant Contact Information -->
            <xsl:for-each select="$var1_instance_InputSchema/SomeBatchOfStuff/Person/PhoneNumber">
                <nc:ContactInformation>
                    <xsl:attribute name="s:id">
                        <xsl:value-of select="generate-id(.)"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    <nc:ContactTelephoneNumber>
                        <nc:FullTelephoneNumber>
                            <nc:TelephoneNumberFullID>
                                <xsl:value-of select="string(.)"/>
                            </nc:TelephoneNumberFullID>
                        </nc:FullTelephoneNumber>
                    </nc:ContactTelephoneNumber>
                </nc:ContactInformation>
            </xsl:for-each>
            
            <!-- Loop through the phone numbers and create a NIEM Conformant Contact Information Association -->
            <xsl:for-each select="$var1_instance_InputSchema/SomeBatchOfStuff/Person">
                <nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation>
                    <nc:PersonReference>
                    <xsl:attribute name="s:ref">
                        <xsl:value-of select="generate-id(.)"/>
                    </xsl:attribute>
                    </nc:PersonReference>
                    <nc:ContactInformationReference>
                        <xsl:attribute name="s:ref">
                            <xsl:value-of select="generate-id(./PhoneNumber)"/>
                        </xsl:attribute>
                    </nc:ContactInformationReference>
                </nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </MyNIEMConformantDocument>
    </xsl:template>                    
</xsl:stylesheet>

The XSLT heavily leverages the XSLT generate-id() function in order to work its magic and result in the following NIEM-conformant XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>   
<MyNIEMConformantDocument xmlns="MyNIEMDocumentNamespace" xmlns:i="http://niem.gov/niem/appinfo/2.0" xmlns:nc="http://niem.gov/niem/niem-core/2.0" xmlns:niem-xsd="http://niem.gov/niem/proxy/xsd/2.0" xmlns:s="http://niem.gov/niem/structures/2.0" xmlns:ns0="SomeNonConformantDocumentNamespace">
   <nc:Person s:id="d0e3">
      <nc:PersonName>
         <nc:PersonFullName>John Doe</nc:PersonFullName>
      </nc:PersonName>
   </nc:Person>
   <nc:Person s:id="d0e12">
      <nc:PersonName>
         <nc:PersonFullName>Sally Smith</nc:PersonFullName>
      </nc:PersonName>
   </nc:Person>
   <nc:ContactInformation s:id="d0e8">
      <nc:ContactTelephoneNumber>
         <nc:FullTelephoneNumber>
            <nc:TelephoneNumberFullID>212-111-2222</nc:TelephoneNumberFullID>
         </nc:FullTelephoneNumber>
      </nc:ContactTelephoneNumber>
   </nc:ContactInformation>
   <nc:ContactInformation s:id="d0e17">
      <nc:ContactTelephoneNumber>
         <nc:FullTelephoneNumber>
            <nc:TelephoneNumberFullID>212-333-4444</nc:TelephoneNumberFullID>
         </nc:FullTelephoneNumber>
      </nc:ContactTelephoneNumber>
   </nc:ContactInformation>
   <nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation>
      <nc:PersonReference s:ref="d0e3"/>
      <nc:ContactInformationReference s:ref="d0e8"/>
   </nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation>
   <nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation>
      <nc:PersonReference s:ref="d0e12"/>
      <nc:ContactInformationReference s:ref="d0e17"/>
   </nc:PersonContactInformationAssociation>
</MyNIEMConformantDocument>