tox's Introduction

Tox

Tox is a high performance XML parser and renderer for Ruby based on Ox. It's best explained using an example:

require 'tox'

xml = %{
  <profile id="20">
    <name>Mike Ross</name>

    <friend title="Name Partner">
      <name>Harvey Specter</name>
      <tags>
        <tag>The Best</tag>
        <tag>Closer</tag>
      </tags>
    </friend>

    <friend title="Paralegal">
      <name>Rachel Zane</name>
      <age>30</age>
    </friend>
  </profile>
}

template = Tox.dsl do
  el(:profile, {
    id: at(:id),
    name: el(:name, text),
    friends: mel(:friend, {
      name: el(:name, text),
      age: el(:age, text),
      title: at(:title),
      tags: el(:tags, mel(:tag, text))
    })
  })
end

v = template.parse(xml)
# {
#   id: "20",
#   name: "Mike Ross",
#   friends: [
#     {
#       title: "Name Partner",
#       name: "Harvey Specter",
#       tags: ["The Best", "Closer"]
#     },
#     {
#       title: "Paralegal",
#       name: "Rachel Zane",
#       age: "30"
#     }
#   ]
# }

template.render(v)
# Outputs input xml

The above template is actually translated to something like:

el(:profile, compose({
  id: at(:id),
  name: el(:name, text),
  friends: collect(el(:friend, compose({
    name: el(:name, text),
    age: el(:age, text),
    title: at(:title),
    tags: el(:tags, collect(el(:tag, text)))
  })))
}))

As you can see, it's a mixture of nodes matching xml elements, and nodes transforming the output structure. If you strip out the transformations, the template should match a subset of the xml. Each XML element can only be specified once in the template. Transformations can hold custom behavior for distributing to and collecting from it's subtree(s). Another example:

template = Tox.dsl do
  el(:names, merge(
    const('array', at(:type)),
    compose(names: collect(el(:name, text)))
  ))
end

template.render(names: ['Mike', 'Harvey'])
# <names type="array">
#   <name>Mike</name>
#   <name>Harvey</name>
# </names>