Passing parameters to an XQuery or XSLT through an XProc Pipeline

I’ve recently been helping someone get started with the XML REST Framework, and they asked about getting query string parameters into the XQueries or XSLTs that were a part of their resource implementation. For those of you who are not familiar, what the XML REST Framework does is leverages Spring MVC for all of the HTTP protocol stuff, a developer builds a very thin Java shim to an XProc pipeline that implements the RESTful service. The post I link to above and two earlier versions explain this all in more detail. What I am focusing on in this post is how I can get values from the query string into the right places within my pipeline; there are two parts to this. 1) you need to get your hands on the query string argument and 2) you need to pass that into the XProc pipeline in such a way that it gets to the XQuery or XSLT. It turns out that #2 was already demonstrated in the Patients.java class file in combination with the resourceGET.xpl. Let’s drill in on that a little bit.

Cleaning WordPress Malware

I was hacked. I cleaned it. I was hacked. I cleaned it. I was hacked…

All told, I think it was 4 times before I stopped the attacks. I don’t like to mess with IT-type issues, least of all security issues, so when something like this comes up, I don’t know what I don’t know, and it takes me some time to learn enough to deal with the issue completely. Before I describe what I did to finally fix things once and for all (knock on wood), let me describe my naivety, because I suspect I am not the only one who suffers from it.

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Balisage 2011

I made it to the Balisage conference this year. I’d been eyeing the conference for a couple of years, so I submitted a paper proposal that was accepted and spent the first week of August in Montreal. I confess, aside from a couple of morning runs in the Mount Royal Park, (which is just fantastic) […]

Paul Maritz’s Keynote At EMC World 2011

Of all of the keynotes and big stage presentations from EMC World 2011, my absolute favorite was the Tuesday morning session from VMWare CEO, Paul Maritz. I tried to tweet a few things but in the end decided that too much would be lost in 140 character snippets. I remember seeing a VMWare presentation about […]

More on PUT Idempotency

This has been a hot topic in my world this week. I have a couple of colleagues with whom I have been having very good discussions (in the context of two totally separate projects) and I wanted to capture one particularly interesting thread here. One of those conversations was started with a reference to a […]

IHE Connectathon – An Oustanding Event

I’m sitting at O’hare waiting for my flight home after a wonderful visit with some friends from my graduate school days at IU that was preceeded by a week of work at the IHE North American Connectathon. As I start writing, it’s in the forth quarter of the NFC championship game, right here in Chicago, […]

XSLT and the default namespace

A colleague of mine who is relatively new to XSLT was getting bitten by an issue with a “hello world” stylesheet where the elements in the source document were all in a namespace and he wasn’t addressing or even including the namespace in the declarations of the XSLT. I found a great write-up that describes […]

Jax-RS : Regular Expressions in @Path Annotations

Sometimes I really wish I did something else for a living. Okay, perhaps a bit over-dramatic but I’m feeling a bit tired this evening and wasting even 20 minutes on something totally useless (which, let’s face it, isn’t unusual in computing) has me ready to call it a night. But since googling the error codes […]

Team!

I didn’t do sports growing up. I’m not sure exactly how or when I learned the meaning of the term “team”, though at some point I must have, because I now have a tremendous appreciation for the team that I am a part of – the Architecture Group in the EMC CTO office. Not sports, […]

Why PUT can’t be used for partial updates

I’ve been discussing PUT vs. PATCH with some colleagues and finally took the time to come up with a concrete example of why PUT absolutely should not be used for partial updates of resources. One colleague pointed out the following points made by Roy Fielding on the AtomPub listserv: FWIW, PUT does not mean store. […]