[OpenLayers-Dev] features from Atom

[Tim Schaub]

Hey-

So, at some point, I'll update the Atom ticket with a patch that 
includes the parser I've been using.  I've also extended this parser in 
an application in a number of ways that might be of general use.  I'm 
interested to hear some feedback before making changes to the version 
bound for the trunk.

Basically, this is about a feature model that allows for round-tripping 
(more of) Atom entries.

So, I'm suggesting extending a feature parsed from an Atom entry the 
following properties:

feature: {
     links: array,
     author: {
         name: string,
         uri: string,
         email: string
     },
     published: date,
     updated: date,
     attributes: {
         title: string,
         description: string,
         content: string,
     }
}

Where each item in the links array would look something like this

link: {
     rel: string,
     href: string
}

(plus more if you care).

The idea is that things in feature.attributes are more likely things 
that users are editing.  Things like dates, author, and links are set 
behind the scenes.

With this, most of the mappings should be obvious (except maybe that 
feature.attributes.description maps to atom:summary).  All other 
(unknown) attributes could get written as atom:category elements with a 
scheme like http://xmlns.openlayers.org/atom#key where the term is value 
of attributes[key].

So, a feature with attributes like

{
     "foo": "bar"
}

would get written out as

<atom:category scheme="http://xmlns.openlayers.org/atom#foo"
                term="bar"/>

This means we loose any optional label.  If we want to save labels, then 
we give features a categories array with objects that have scheme, term, 
and label properties.  Just depends how far we want to go matching Atom 
entries.

I also would suggest we parse the first element representing a geometry 
and ignore the rest.  The new parser structure I'm using is easy enough 
to extent id you want different behavior.

Thanks for any feedback,
Tim