Converter contexts can be used to pass around information in recursive calls to the convert and mapped methods. A Converter object will be passed in all calls, so this object is the place to store information. However if each element, procinst and entity class decided on its own which attributes names to use, name collisions would be inevitable. To avoid this, the following system is used.

When a class wants to store information in a converter, it has to define a Context class (normally derived from the Context class of its base class). The constructor must initialize the context object to a initial state. You can get the context object for a certain class by treating the converter as a dictionary with the class (or an instance) as the key like this:

from ll.xist import xsc

class counter(xsc.Element):
·  class Context(xsc.Element.Context):
·  ·  def __init__(self):
·  ·  ·  xsc.Element.Context.__init__(self)
·  ·  ·  self.count = 0

·  def convert(self, converter):
·  ·  context = converter[self]
·  ·  node = xsc.Text(context.count)
·  ·  context.count += 1
·  ·  return node

When using pools it's possible to do some sort of “namespace subclassing”.

Registering a module in a pool not only registers the element, procinst and entity classes in the pool for parsing, but each attribute of the module (as long as it's weak referencable) is available as an attribute of the pool itself:

from ll.xist import xsc
from ll.xist.ns import html

pool = xsc.Pool(html)
print(pool.img)

This outputs <element class ll.xist.ns.html:img at 0x3eed00>.

It's possible to chain pools together. When an attribute isn't found in the first pool, it will be looked up in a second pool (the so called base pool):

from ll.xist import xsc
from ll.xist.ns import html, svg

hpool = xsc.Pool(html)
spool = xsc.Pool(svg, hpool)
print(spool.img)

Here the hpool (containing the html namespace) will be used when the attribute can't be found in spool. So this will again give the output <element class ll.xist.ns.html:img at 0x3eed00>.

It's possible to get automatic pool chaining. If a module has an attribute __bases__ (which must be a sequence of modules), they will be wrapped in a pool automatically and used as the base pools for the pool created for the first module. This makes it possible to “overwrite” element classes in existing namespaces. For example to replace the a class in ll.xist.ns.html, put the following into a module html2:

from ll.xist.ns import html

__bases__ = [html]

class a(html.a):
·  xmlns = html.xmlns

·  def convert(self, converter):
·  ·  node = html.a(self.content, self.attrs, target="_top")
·  ·  return node.convert(converter)

Now you can use the module in a pool:

from ll.xist import xsc
import html2

pool = xsc.Pool(html2)
print(pool.a, pool.b)

This outputs:

<element class html2:a at 0x113ec40> <element class ll.xist.ns.html:b at 0x1101fe0>

Note that such a chained pool can of course be used when parsing XML. The parser will recursively search for the first class that has the appropriate name when instantiating the tree nodes.

The converter argument passed to the convert method has an attribute target which is a module or pool and specifies the target namespace to which self should be converted.

You can check which conversion is wanted by checking e.g. the xmlns attribute. Once this is determined you can use element classes from the target to create the required XML object tree. This makes it possible to customize the conversion by passing a chained pool to the convert method that extends an existing namespace.

The following example shows how an element be converted to two different targets:

from ll.xist import xsc
from ll.xist.ns import html, fo

class bold(xsc.Element):
·  def convert(self, converter):
·  ·  if converter.target.xmlns == html.xmlns:
·  ·  ·  node = converter.target.b(self.content)
·  ·  elif converter.target.xmlns == fo.xmlns:
·  ·  ·  node = converter.target.inline(self.content, font_weight="bold")
·  ·  else:
·  ·  ·  raise TypeError("unsupported conversion target {!r}".format(converter.target))
·  ·  return node.convert(converter)

The default target for conversion is ll.xist.ns.html. Other targets can be specified via the target argument in the Converter constructor or the conv method:

>>> from ll.xist.ns import html, fo
>>> import foo # This is the code from above
>>> print(foo.bold("foo").conv().string())
<b>foo</b>
>>> print(foo.bold("foo").conv(target=html).string())
<b>foo</b>
>>> print(foo.bold("foo").conv(target=fo).string())
<inline font-weight="bold">foo</inline>

When generating HTML you might want to make sure that your generated code doesn't contain any illegal element nesting (i.e. something bad like <p><p>foo</p></p> in HTML). The module ll.xist.ns.html does this automatically:

>>> from ll.xist.ns import html
>>> node = html.p(html.p(u"foo"))
>>> print(node.string())
/Users/walter/checkouts/LivingLogic.Python.xist/src/ll/xist/sims.py:222: \
WrongElementWarning: element <ll.xist.ns.html.p element object (1 child/no attrs) at 0x270b30> \
may not contain element <ll.xist.ns.html.p element object (1 child/no attrs) at 0x69850>
  warnings.warn(WrongElementWarning(node, child, self.elements))
<p><p>foo</p></p>

For your own elements you can specify the content model too. This is done by setting the class attribute model inside the element class. model must be an object that provides a checkvalid method. This method will be called during parsing or publishing with the element as an argument. When invalid content is detected, the Python warning framework should be used to issue a warning.

The module ll.xist.sims contains several classes that provide simple validation methods: Empty can be used to ensure that the element doesn't have any content (like br and img in HTML). Any does allow any content. NoElements will warn about elements from the same namespace (elements from other namespaces will be OK). NoElementsOrText will warn about elements from the same namespace and non-whitespace text content. Elements will only allow the elements specified in the constructor. ElementsOrText will only allow the elements specified in the constructor and text.

None of these classes will check the number of child elements or their order.

For more info see the sims module.