#28 White-space handling in AttributeValue tags

[Roland Illig]

The XACML examples in the specification contain white-space characters in many <AttributeValue> tags, for indenting the text. sunxacml doesn't strip this text, but should.

Example: <AttributeValue DataType="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer"> 18446744073709551616
</AttributeValue>

Results in:
java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "
18446744073709551616
"
at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Long.parseLong(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.Long.parseLong(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.xacml.attr.IntegerAttribute.getInstance(IntegerAttribute.java:145)
at com.sun.xacml.attr.IntegerAttribute.getInstance(IntegerAttribute.java:126)
at com.sun.xacml.attr.proxy.IntegerAttributeProxy.getInstance(IntegerAttributeProxy.java:57)

When I remove the white-space around the number, it works.

[Roland Illig]

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Just a small addition: Of course it doesn't work, since sunxacml cannot handle integer numbers larger than 2^63-1. (There's a difference between xs:integer and xs:long.)

[Roland Illig]

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Finally I'm not sure whose fault this is:

either the XACML committee doesn't know XML well enough to provide valid examples without the extra confusing white-space.

or sunxacml should strip white-space, but I couldn't find anything in the XML or XACML specification that requires an implementation to do so.

So the more probable cause is the XACML committee. Sad, but true.