XML – Extensible Markup Language

Processing XML data in user interfaces developed with the ISA Dialog Manager.

• Read, write, transform and validate XML documents.
• Easily serialize IDM objects to XML and deserialize XML to IDM objects.
• Simple interface for navigating and manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM).
• Definition of several custom transformations per node, depending on type, value and attributes.
• Traversing an XML document or its DOM with multiple independent cursors at the same time.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has now become the “lingua franca” for data of all kinds and with the XML interface of the ISA Dialog Manager you can easily use such data in your user interfaces. There are many possible applications for this, for example configuring dialogs, saving settings and preferences, or exchanging data between the user interface and the application. Using the XML interface and the transformations it enables, you can serialize IDM objects by storing their attributes in XML files and deserialize them by creating GUI objects with the attribute values stored in XML files.

The ISA Dialog Manager XML interface offers you a simple programming model with four objects for reading, writing and transforming XML data. The Document object contains an XML document or its representation as a Document Object Model (DOM). You use a doccursor to go through the nodes of the document. You use Transformer objects to perform arbitrary semantic transformations on nodes in the DOM. You define the individual semantic actions in the form of mapping objects.

Transformer and Mapping objects can work on both XML documents and IDM object hierarchies. This makes it easier to serialize and deserialize GUI objects, for example to persist the state of the user interface and restore it at a later time.

The XML interface is already included in all basic licenses of the Windows, Unix and Linux versions of the ISA Dialog Manager.

We offer a course on the XML Interface. There you will learn how to process XML data with the ISA Dialog Manager (read in, transform, output).