Re: ANNOUNCE: Avatox 1.0 is now available

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

This is excellent news. I think I shall still carry on with my own
asis2xml (under
http://gnat-asis.sourceforge.net/pmwiki.php/Main/ASIS2XML, no releases
as yet) for a while.

I took the view that <A_DEFINING_NAME/> would look better as
<defining_name/> throughout.

There are also some interesting choices about which aspects to map
into attributes and which into child elements, and indeed on the whole
mapping to be used.

Do you support multi-unit environments?

Do you think there'd be a future in offering at least the concept to
the ASIS team?

As a demo of the sort of thing one can do, we found it pretty
straightforward to generate a report on all the exception handlers in
our application which capture non-generated exceptions, so that we
could review whether the logging being done was appropriate. The XML
for the application was >50MB, but the performance was pretty
reasonable (of order a minute to generate the report; generating the
XML took rather longer).

The guts of the XSLT report script (not at all perfect, but good
enough, and excluding some extra rules for tasks) was

  <xsl:template match="*[@unit]" mode="handlers">
    <!-- Skip 'raise ColdFrame.Exceptions.*'. -->
    <xsl:if test=".//exception_handler
                  [not(raise_statement//identifier='ColdFrame'
                  and raise_statement//identifier='Exceptions')]">
      <tr>
        <td>
          <xsl:value-of select="@unit"/>
        </td>
        <td>
          <xsl:if test=".//exception_handler[not(raise_statement)]">
            <xsl:text>Yes</xsl:text>
          </xsl:if>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>

which says "for every unit that has an exception handler in it at some
level of nesting that doesn't raise one of the generated exceptions,
output a table row containg the unit name and, if the exception
handler doesn't contain a raise statement, the word 'Yes'".