SnTTWednesday, November 07, 2007
SnTT: NotesSAX Parsing
Jake was asking about how to filter out malicous tags and code, I suggested using the NotesSAXParser after the HTML is converted to XHTML. I'm suprised that no one uses this as an approach, I mean fundementally XHTML is XML and the right tools for parsing this is the NotesSAXParser and NotesDOMParser. I figured that maybe there has not been a example of its use. So here is a sample class pulled right out of our home grown content management system - which uses NotesSAXParser - a little early for Show-and-Tell Thursdays...
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Looks interesting Tony. Have you got an example of its use?
ReplyDeleteJake
Here is the XML that describes the home page for http://www.scius.com.au. homepage.xml.
ReplyDeleteThe RenderEngine takes the xml which is a mix of XHTML and the CMS tags to build the HTML.
Is that what you mean ?
oops wrong link - homepage.xml
ReplyDeleteThat's seems like an ingenious approach to website templating.
ReplyDeleteThe power of the Sax-parser combined with the ability to fill in content on a node to node basis.
Regarding why no one other uses it, Notes/Domino is a giant toolbox. There are several "right tools". Once you find one that is fast/functional enough, it's easy to stop looking for a better tool.
A couple of questions:
Is the HTML for a page created on WQO?
Have you used other ways of templating before/do you have performance comparisons?
If someone messes up (if that's possible), and enters something like this <<div>, how does the rendering engine handle this?
Tommy, Yes a WQO generates the content. I've used templating before for email generation using tags like ${doc:fieldname} but not for HTML generation. So I don't have any comparisons. I did look at the page generation performance for the websites that I've developed and way happy with the response time. However, the websites that I have developed didn't have a large site map - That would impact performance. If I get to that stage then I'll add in some caching.
ReplyDeleteI've spent time coding JSP for plain web apps on Webshere and Websphere Portal skins and themes, so I was looking for something that was more align with open standards. There seems to be a number of different ways that templating has been approached, like project dx - but again not a standard approach outside of the Notes/Domino world.
The render engine displays the SAX errors in-line with the HTML and some diagnostics - that way you can see straigtht away where the problems is - this include invalid XML too. So your example would be displayed as an error.
You need to ensure that you have correct XML - which can be a constraint sometimes - but not a bad thing in reality.