Could anyone within Microsoft comment on the status of the XmlResolver
class in upcoming versions of the .NET framework? I am particularly
interested in hearing about any improvements in how PUBLIC and SYSTEM
entity references are handled.

My hope is that improvements have been made that would finally allow
one to build an XmlResolver that provides XML Catalog capabilities as
described in the OASIS-OPEN XML Catalogs Working Draft.

Without the ability to differentiate between PUBLIC and SYSTEM entities
during resolution of external resources it is very difficult to take
full advantage of the System.Xml parsers in applications that process
DocBook or other narrative form XML documents.

I realize that most of the focus seems to be on improving System.Xml
for use in data oriented XML documents for web services and the like.
Hopefully someone at Microsoft has recognized the need to support
narrative documents as well.

Cheers

-- Bennett

Hello ..... anyone out there?

Since my last post I have been experimenting with the XmlResolver class
in the .NET Framework 2.0 beta release. I built my own resolver
implementation and it seems to be working okay. I am running into
inconsistent behavior in the XmlReader logic. It seems like sometimes
the XmlReader tries to resolve the PUBLIC identifier first and follows
up with the SYSTEM identifier. Other times the XmlReader seems to skip
the PUBLIC identifier all together and just resolves the SYSTEM
identifier.

Microsoft does not seem to have documented the logic in XmlReader for
when it calls the methods of the XmlResolver class. It would be very
helpful to see this documented, as it would be useful information when
building an XmlResolver implementation.

I think it would be very helpful if there were a way in the XmlResolver
calls to determine if the XmlReader was trying to resolve a PUBLIC or
SYSTEM entity reference. This would make is very straight forward to
implement the XML Catalog specification in a custom XmlResolver.
Comments anyone?

-- Bennett

[quoted text, click to view]

I'm not sure if anything's going on currently on that, but once Beta2 is
out I'm going to pursue the issue. We need XmlCatalogs support for .NET
and I believe chances are high we can get XmlResolver fixed to allow
that in .NET 2.0.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, MCP]