[Cart-users] Some issues with CART and non-compliant servers

[Frank K. <fku...@to...>]

Hi:
I've had to code around several issues with non-compliant RETS servers.
Some of these issues may be suitably addressed by modifying CART. For
others, there may be ways that I can configure CART to handle more
gracefully. Please give me input on how best to handle these:

1. SAXParseException: The entity name must immediately follow the '&' in the entity reference.
Some MLS listings end up with ampersands in their data, e.g. in the
property description. Unfortunately, SAX just throws up over these. I've
not much experience with tweaking SAX, but the only obvious way that I
see to deal with this is to modify the characters() method in the
SearchResultHandler to escape any ampersands in the <DATA> content.
	Is there a better approach?

2. client.LogoutResponse - Invalid logout response key: Logged Out -> <null>
a.   Actually, I couldn't even get this output until I first modified
KeyValueResponse.HandleRetsResponse(). The method assumes that the
RetsResponse Element actually has a "=" in the content. If the "=" is
missing then a catastrophic null pointer exception occurs.
I fixed this by modifying the HandleRetsResponse() method to substitute
the string "<null>" if there is no equals.
b.   Beyond that, if the server returns anything other than 
"ConnectTime", "Billing", or "SignOffMessage", then
LogoutResponse.handleKeyValue() chooses to fail catastrophically, which
locks CART out of the ability to work with some RETS servers.
I handled this by modifying the handleKeyValue() method to simply log an
error in this situation.

Are my chosen modifications the best way to handle these issues? I'm
starting to feel like I need to continually tweak rets-client every time
I work with another (non-compliant) RETS server out there.

Regards,

Frank