4 ms·
Unless you know exactly the format of the data you're getting back. So in my use case it's not arbitrary XML but rather it's constrained to a particular message
by jschwartzi 8y ago
Unless you know exactly the format of the data you're getting back. So in my use case it's not arbitrary XML but rather it's constrained to a particular message with specific fields that are named in a specific way. So it's really a text response that looks like XML rather than being some arbitrary XML message that differs after each response.
We're literally getting the exact same XML message back, but with different text in each field. The framework we were using insisted on parsing each response separately even though the responses were basically the same, but with different values in the exact same XML tags.
- sk5t 8y agoIf you control precisely the inputs, then it could certainly be fine... until it's not because other thing changed. Please consider it a brittle hack.
- jschwartzi 8y agoCalling it a "brittle hack" implies that I don't have any control over the other endpoint. In reality my employer controls the endpoint I'm hitting. So it's not a brittle hack in our organization even though it would be a brittle hack if we were, say, hitting a Twitter API. In my opinion it's the same kind of optimization as massaging your data inputs to span cache lines in your MCU to improve performance. By requiring the data to be well-specified in its format you can ignore all of the clues that XML provides about the format of the data, because you can assume the format in advance. So all the stuff like schemas and validation become completely unnecessary because you already know what valid data looks like.