You need to automatically detect a few aspects of your build environment, which is done by running ./configure --prefix=PREFIX where PREFIX is the installation directory you wish to use. It is recommended to install into the GNAT directory. This way the project files will be installed into the default location where gnatmake and gprbuild are looking for projects. If, however, you are running a cross-compiler, you need to add an additional command line switch to configure, namely ./configure --prefix=PREFIX --target=TARGET where target will be similar to "powerpc-wrs-vxworks", "powerpc-elinos-linux", or any other prefix used to find the name of the gnatmake executable to run. By default, XML/Ada will build both static and shared libraries, if "configure" detected that the latter were supported on your system. You can prevent the building of shared libraries by specifying --disable-shared as an extra switch to configure. Once installed, your applications will by default be linked statically with XML/Ada. You can change that default by specifying explicitly --enable-shared as an extra switch to configure. To install the library, use the following command line: make all install If your application is built using a runtime which is not the default, you need to build XmlAda with the same runtime. This is done by simply adding an RTS=NAME argument to the make command above. For instance, to build and install the XmlAda library with the "rtp" runtime, adjust the make command above as follow: make all install RTS=rtp You can also override the default install location by adding the argument IPREFIX=PATH to the make command above. Compiling with other Ada compilers ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ This library has been reported as being compilable with other compilers than GNAT. No build script is provided however. INSTALLING THIS LIBRARY ON WINDOWS ---------------------------------- 1. Due to the nature of GNU Make you need to have a UNIX-type shell and utilities installed to build this library. If you do not have this, you can download a set at: Cygwin : http://cygwin.com/ Mingw : http://www.mingw.org/ (MSYS Toolset) 2. Run 'sh configure --prefix=<installation directory>' to generate the makefile. where "installation directory" is the place where you want to install XML/Ada. 3. Before building make sure to set the following values in 'Makefile': PREFIX=C:/GNATPRO/6.4.2 the makefile where to install the library. Note the slashes in the path! The value should have been set properly by the call to configure. It is recommended to install into the GNAT directory. This way the project files will be installed into the default location where gnatmake and gprbuild are looking for projects. 4. As a general rule for GNAT, the temporary directory must be accessible from gnatmake native applications (not a cygwin path). For instance, from cygwin: export TMPDIR=c:/tmp Failing to check this might prevent the building of shared libraries 5. The best way to proceed is to do a 'make all install'. It is possible that make complains that it cannot execute an "install" executable. In such a case, it is recommended to execute "make INSTALL=cp install" instead to use "cp" to do the installation TWEAKING THE LIBRARY -------------------- You can change the way the library behaves, in particular the DOM part, by changing some of the hard-coded constants in the code. If you change these, you will need to recompile the library and your application: - sax-encodings.ads :: Encoding It contains the encoding used internally by the library. The default is UTF8, which supports the whole Unicode range, and is economical memory-wise - dom-core.ads :: Shared_Strings and dom-core.ads :: Shared_Node_Names Whether the internal representation of namespaces should be shared among nodes. The default is yes USING THE LIBRARY ----------------- See the XML/Ada user's guide for information on how to use this library. TESTING THE LIBRARY ------------------- Several test programs are provided in the XML/Ada source package. These are found in the dom/test and sax/test subdirectories. These are very simple examples on how to use the DOM and SAX API. The w3c organization has constructed an official testsuite that can be used to check XML/Ada. Most likely, this is only useful to you if you are modifying XML/Ada itself. Here is how you can run this testsuite: You need to download the official XML Conformance Testsuite for XML, The name of the current archive is xmlts20080827.tar The URL is: http://www.w3.org/XML/Test/ Uncompress it somewhere on your disk, then add a link in tests/dom, which points to the directory where you unpackaged the testsuite. The link should be called "tests". A similar setup is required for the W3C schema testsuite. The URL of the testsuite is: http://www.w3.org/XML/2004/xml-schema-test-suite/xmlschema2006-11-06/xsts-2007-06-20.tar.gz This file should be extracted in the tests/schema directory (creating a xmlschema-2006-11-06 subdirectory as a result). Then execute the command from the toplevel directory: make run_test This will report the number of errors found. The W3C committee has reviewed the status of a number of tests since the testsuite was released (as developers of XML parsers have reported issues with the testsuite). They provide a public CVS repository that include the metadata for the tests (list of tests, their status, expected output,...), but unfortunately not the tests themselves. As a result, getting the latest version requires several steps. First get the .tar.gz as described above, and extract it in schema/test. From the same directory, run: cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public login cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public -z5 co XML/xml-schema-test-suite/2004-01-14/xmlschema2006-11-06 You can update that directory at any time with: cd XML; cvs update The XML/Ada testsuite will automatically take advantage of that directory if found. You need however to manually run cd schema/test ./schematest --cvs to get the output under those conditions, since "make run_test" is setup for the .tar.gz output. CONTENTS OF THE LIBRARY ----------------------- The sources in this library are split into several subdirectories, each with its own README, sources, documentation and unit tests. The list of subdirectories (aka modules) is: - unicode: provides a full support for Unicode and Utf8/Utf16/Utf32 encodings. It also support other encodings like Latin1, Latin2, ... - input_sources provides types to read characters from several types of media. - sax Provides a common, standard interface for any XML parser, through callback subprograms. You can extend any of the tagged types defined in these packages and thus parse XML files without having to store an XML tree in memory. This package is compatible with SAX 2.0, but doesn't implement the functions specific to SAX 1.0 - dom The Document Object Model is a set of standard subprograms to manipulate XML tree in memory. Only the Core module is currently implemented. - docs This contains the full documentation for this XML library BUG REPORTS ----------- Please send questions and bug reports to support@gnat.com following the same procedures used to submit reports with the GNAT toolset itself.