Unencoded > in exported OPT for generic RM types

Tool Support CKM
1

Generic types like DV_INTERVAL<DV_DATE_TIME> have inconsistently converted <...> for the generic part. Only the < is converted to &lt;. The ending > is not encoded to &gt;.

In CKM on “OPT” tab:

 <rm_type_name>DV_INTERVAL<DV_DATE_TIME></rm_type_name>

OPT downloaded from CKM “Export Template” tab:

<rm_type_name>DV_INTERVAL&lt;DV_DATE_TIME></rm_type_name>

Notice that the ending > is not converted to &gt;.

Examples (search for DV_INTERVAL):

2

In the OPT Tab, &lt; is rendered as < by the browser.

This is the same if I just type it in discourse, it will be rendered as < if I don’t use preformatted text.

If you copy or download and view in a text editor it will show you the &lt; as you have noted. However if you open the exact same document in a browser etc. e.g. with an xml extension instead of opt it will also render it as >. Probably most xml editors would behave similarly and make this transparent to the user.

< must be escaped in text within an xml document, whereas for > this is not required (within text) as far as I know. So this is what we are doing. We could make it more ugly by using &gt; but this is not a requirement as far as I know.

1 Like
3

I would prefer ugly but consistent (&lt;...&gt;) :blush:

But as you say the current variant is a valid XML :man_shrugging:

I have updated my XML parser to handle the current format. Thank you for explaining that this is the expected output in OPT files.

4

I did some more research :blush:

When the same OPT is exported from the Archetype Designer, it encodes both &lt; and &gt;.

When the archetype with DV_INTERVAL<DV_DATE_TIME> (https://ckm.openehr.org/ckm/archetypes/1013.1.614/export) is exported from CKM as XML, it also encodes both &lt; and &gt;.

Only export to OPT from CKM leaves the > unencoded.

5

In my understanding both are correct, any xml parser should deal with this transparently?

6

@sebastian.garde I’m not saying it is a bug :blush: As you mentioned, it is a valid XML.

I first stumbled on this with CKM OPTs but wanted to document it in case others stumble on the same thing. It took me some time debugging my code before I noticed that > is part of DV_INTERVAL:

<rm_type_name>DV_INTERVAL&lt;DV_DATE_TIME></rm_type_name>

However it would be interesting to check the code used to export archetypes to XML and the one that exports to OPT. I would expect the same code to be used for rm_type_name :thinking: