[Tclxml-users] DOCTYPE requirements

[Matthew K. <kr...@wa...>]

I'm looking into using XML-RPC for a project at work.  I have
installed an XML-RPC server under a test server here that seems to
work OK - it passes the 'validating' tests at validator.xmlrpc.com but
I seem to be having some problems using the xml-rpc client built on
top of tclDom (using the tclXml parser).

The problem seems to be related to the DOCTYPE tag as I show below
(I've added some 'puts' to the tcl code so I could see exactly what
was being generated):

---
% xmlrpc::call $url $proc -struct $args
Executing rpc: {<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE methodCall>
<methodCall><methodName>validator1.easyStructTest</methodName><params><param><value><struct><member><name>curly</name><value><i4>4</i4></value></member><member><name>larry</name><value><i4>5</i4></value></member><member><name>moe</name><value><i4>6</i4></value></member></struct></value></param></params></methodCall>}
callresponse: HTTP status ok data {Ooh, a nasty error: invalid node ID }
XMLRPC_ERROR {remote procedure call failed due to "invalid token """}

---
OK, that doesn't really tell us too much.  After a lot of digging
arround I figured it was somehow related to the DOCTYPE tag and
modified TclDOM to not automatically generate/print the DOCTYPE
tag.  This is what I got:

---
% xmlrpc::call $url $proc -struct $args
Executing rpc: {<?xml version='1.0'?>
<methodCall><methodName>validator1.easyStructTest</methodName><params><param><value><struct><member><name>curly</name><value><i4>4</i4></value></member><member><name>larry</name><value><i4>5</i4></value></member><member><name>moe</name><value><i4>6</i4></value></member></struct></value></param></params></methodCall>}
callresponse: HTTP status ok data {<?xml version="1.0"?>
<methodResponse>
<params>
<param>
<value>
<i4>15</i4>
</value>
</param>
</params>
</methodResponse>
}
15
---

So things worked well.  My questions, then are:

1. Is DOCTYPE _required_ for wellformedness
2. It seems that most xml-rpc implementations do not include the
DOCTYPE tag.  There is no mention made of it in the xmlrpc.org spec
page, and it is not present in any examples.  Given that, is there
some way we could make optional the automatic insertion of the DOCTYPE
that tclDom performs?

I realize that it would probaly be better to have an rpc server that
could handle either case, but there are some large barriers there (we
are using AOLServer with the ns_xml extention and an rpc client on top
of that - it works, but I'm not sure how much I want to mess with it.)

matthew