Hey folks,
Just an FYI for those of you who use the Turbo XML software from Tibco
that is available with Architect (maybe others) installation. I found a
real ugly BUG in their parser. AND because their "customer service" (like
a 'civil war' a CONTRADICTION IN TERMS) stank so badly, I thought I'd do
two things
1. Tell you about the but. I do my DTD development in Codewright
(Borland really screwed up when the stopped supporting this tool) and then
parse with DTGEN from the command line, Oxygen (nice, but no where near as
nice overall as Codewright), XML Spy (the only thing Spy is good for IMHO,
but I don't like their tech support from a LONG time back) and Turbo XML
(I like the visual display and the list of elements the USE the current
element).
Anyway, the BUG. I was typing a change to our DTD and made a couple of
typos (here are the content models AS TYPED).
The first has two errors, one is a missing connector (no comma after the
second %alert; ENTITY) and the other (hidden because you don't see the
ENTITY declaration) is a missing set of parens around the %para0_ent;+).
The second is an extra open parens before the %p;.
And Turbo didn't report a problem with EITHER, but DTGEN, Oxygen and Spy
all did.
2. As it took nearly twenty minutes to find a way to CONTACT Tibco if I
am not a PAY for support customer, I thought I'd embarrass them
publically. I can accept (don't necessarily like it) making people PAY
for support and then provide no means of contacting them to report a BUG
if you don't have a support agreement.
I normally try to be professional on Adepters and not ridicule or
intentionally demean other members (I pick on folks like Ed, Andy, myself
or other major posters like Brent yesterday that I have worked with on
Adepters for long periods [which if PTC changes how Adepters is run I will
sorely miss]). There are occasions when derision is needed. Poor
customer support or a disinterest in improving their product line is one
such case. But then Turbo XML has not been updated in three years, so
maybe I am barking up the wrong tree and there is NO customer support for
a product they are still SELLING [but then Borland does that for
Codewright and they didn't even cut the price to buy the unsupported
software]).
Lynn
P.S. For those who are not aware, you can parse a DTD from a DOS command
line (another reason I LOVE Codewright, it has a DOS shell that I can move
around in, copy, cut, paste, etc inside of) with the DTGEN command. I'd
give a help number, but this is undocumented. But if you open a DOS
window and go to the \bin folder in your Epic installation and type DTGEN,
you will get some embedded help. I made this a BAT file (see the text
below)
rem This file will fill in the blanks for dtgen.
rem %1 is the doctype name from the DOCTYPE declaration
rem %2 is the DTD name (and path if you are not in the folder
rem with the DTD.
c:\epic5-2\bin\dtgen -xml -doctype %1 %2
Handy tool if you want to work outside of a development tool (not for the
squeamish) or if you want a second parser to check your work. I didn't
embellish this to ask for the DOCTYPE name or DTD path/name, I just type
them in after the batch file name (in my case the file is dt-parse.bat, so
the command line is dt-parse DOCTYPE-Name DTD-path-name)
