[Chiba-users] PUT does not round-trip XML processing directives or DOCTYPE!

[Bryan T. <br...@th...>]

It appears that Chiba does not round-trip XML processing directives for
"PUT".

Consider: You have an XML resource that uses an <?xml-stylesheet href="..."
?> directive to associate a CSS stylesheet that will render the resource in
web browser.  If you then use Chiba to edit the XML resource, the
<?xml-stylesheet ...?> directive gets stomped.

I'm not sure what XForms has to say about this, but I would certainly want
Chiba to round-trip the entire XML representation making only those edits
that were directly licensed through binds on the instance data, or through
explicit submission attributes, such as setting the encoding for the XML
serialization.

Being a curious sort, I was wondering if Chiba would round-trip a DOCTYPE
declaration.  It does not.

My guess is that the XML processing pipeline is not being mindful of these
issues.  Since both the XML processing directives and the internal DTD
subset are outside of the XML instance data that can be addressed by XForms,
I would guess that the problem is that the "PUT request generated by the
ChibaBean (or where ever this happens) is simply serializing the XML
instance data as the HTTP request entity.  What it needs to do is keep
around the "shell" of the XML resource representation from which the
instance data was populated so that the XML processing directives and
internal DTD subset don't get dropped.  When it does a PUT it can just
replace the root element of that "shell" and then serialize the resulting
XML model.

-bryan