[SQLObject] Serializing SQLObjects (Across Joins) as XML

[Sean M. H. <str...@ma...>]

First, kudos to all SQLObject contributors. I've been using it for just over
24 hours, and I already can't imagine database persistence without it.

Second, I am new to the list, but I did search the archives before posting.
I only offer this disclaimer because I was surprised by how few messages I
saw containing "XML".

That being said, I'm looking for a pythonic solution to serialize my
SQLObject subclasses as xml. At the single SQLObject level this is
trivial--in fact the included __repr__ definition is just a few
modifications away from returning a valid xml representation of the object.

What's not trivial--for me--is representing the related objects' data. I
would like to represent any *-to-many joins for the object as child elements
of the original object. For instance, I'd like to have the "xml" property of
a Person from the personaddress.py example look like the following:

    <person id="1" firstName="John" lastName="Doe">
        <address id="1" street="123" city="Smallsville" state="IL"
zip="50484"/>
    </person>

If I wanted to custom build each object's xml representation by hand that
also would be trivial, but I'm trying to abstract this out so all the work
is done within a generic super-class (which itself would be a sub-class of
SQLObject).

So...

Q1: If I'm creating a new intermediate class for the purpose of adding the
XML serialization features, what is the best abstract way to navigate the
one-to-many join data? I see that each SQLObject has a join list and
dictionary, but I'm getting lost on interrogating the Join objects to get to
the SQLObjects on the other side of the relationship.

Q2: Reality check: Is there another xml serialization framework, or even
something with SQLObject, that makes what I'm trying to do a waste of time?
I've been keeping my eyes open for such an animal for several months, but I
haven't seen anything that I think would marry happily with SQLObject.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

-- 

Sean M. Hester 
"Good code is art."