XML tag without content

[martinnicolas]

Some times we need to define an xml tag without content inside like this:

  <Tag> </Tag>

Currently, shale is closing xml tags without content like this:

  <Tag/>

Im fixing this mapping content to empty string. Like this

  attribute :content, Shale::Type::String, default: -> { " " }

and this

  xml do
    root 'Tag'
    map_content to: :content

It could be a nice improvement to provide an option to choose how to close tags without content!.

[kgiszczak]

Yeah, that would be a nice addition, unfortunately that's not something Shale controls. How the rendering is done is entirely dependent on the underlaying XML parser, or event parser version/architecture (e.g. I ran into issues where generated XML was different on Mac OS and Linux when using Nokogiri).

You can try to use different parser, e.g. REXML and Ox allow to control how the nodes are rendered by using nil or empty string '' e.g.

require 'shale'
require 'shale/adapter/rexml'

Shale.xml_adapter = Shale::Adapter::REXML

class Person < Shale::Mapper
  attribute :first_name, Shale::Type::String
  attribute :last_name, Shale::Type::String

  xml do
    root 'person'
    map_element 'first_name', to: :first_name, render_nil: true
    map_element 'last_name', to: :last_name, render_nil: true
  end
end

person = Person.new(first_name: '', last_name: nil)

puts person.to_xml(pretty: true)

This will render:

<person>
  <first_name></first_name>
  <last_name/>
</person>

[martinnicolas]

Nice!. I will try these alternatives. Thanks!.