Exercises

Accounts

After the registration deadline in TISS we will invite you to our course in TUWEL.

Upload of the solutions to the exercise

Exercises 1 and 2 will be uploaded to the CourseManager. You will be able to upload your solution as a zip-file. Only the zip-file that you have uploaded last will be graded. The teaching assistants will be able to download your solution.

Assignment discussions - reservation of a timeslot

To reserve a timeslot for the assignment discussion is mandatory. We will open the reservation system in TUWEL a few days (in general one week) before the first assignment discussion and will be closed the day before the first assignment discussion.

We will have a sufficient amount of timeslots. Please, reserve your favorite choice as soon as possible! If you are not able to attend your timeslot without a valid excuse (e.g. sudden illnes), you will receive 0 points!

The teaching assistant will also ask questions on the topics covered in the lecture; in extreme cases it is possible to receive 0 points for a correct solution!

If you are not able to attend any of the offered timeslots, you have to give us a valid excuse to get a different timeslot (e.g. confirmation of a physician, travel documents, ...).

xmllint

XML files can be checked for well-formedness and validated against DTDs and XML schemas with xmllint. The reference for this tool is located here.

Downloads are available at xmlsoft.org. Here are direct links to the Windows- and the Linux version.

For Windows users we have compiled a zip-file with all the dependencies. You only have to unzip this file and add the bin directory to your PATH environment variable. The zip-file can be found here: TU-xmllint-win32.zip

DOM and SAX for Java

DOM and SAX libraries are already included in the JDK (Java Development Kit). Please make sure that your source files compile with JDK 7! This Java version is also used during your assignment discussion.

XPathWay

You can evaluate your XPath expression with the tool XPathWay (Version 1.01). This tool supports primarily XPath 2.0!

Notice the following for the use of namespace prefixes in your queries:

• Queries are always evaluated against the prefixes known at the current XML node. This node can be set with the "Set Root" button.
• After the document has been loaded, this node is the document node, for which no prefixes have been bound.
• If the expression uses prefixes that are defined in the document element, then you have to set with "Set Root" this node as context node. Notice that your expression is evaluated relative to this node.
• Absolute expressions evaluate always correctly from the document node, i.e. //* selects all element nodes in the document.

Saxon

For the execution of XQueries and XSLT Stylesheets the XQuery- and XSLT processor Saxon can be used. Version 9 can be downloaded here. The JAR file has to be added to your CLASSPATH environment variable.

Queries are executed with:
java net.sf.saxon.Query -s:test.xml -q:xquery.xq -o:out.xml

XSLT Stylesheets are executed with:
java net.sf.saxon.Transform -s:test.xml -xsl:test.xsl -o:out.xml

XML editing

Any XML editor can be used during the course of this exercise. You have to be able to explain your solution!

In principle any text editor can be used for writing XML files. The editors mentioned here provide at least syntax highlighting, which helps you in the editing process. Please check the correct encoding of your files!

Here you can find a more or less random selection of possible tools. A more general overview can be found on Wikipedia: Comparison of XML editors.

If you know any good and free (at least for teaching purposes) software, write an e-mail to ssd(at)dbai.tuwien.ac.at.