Standards » Data Area » DFDL WG

Spec says escapeCharacter, escapeBlockStart, and excapeBlockEnd contribute to the content length of an element.

escapeEscapeCharacter is missing this stipulation and should be made consistent.

However, I believe this is incorrect. These all contribute to the value length, that is to say, they appear within the "SimpleValue | NilLogicalValue" , or NilLiteralValue (for simple types) region.

There is awkwardness here in that per a separate issue tracker for Action 242, we intended to explicitly create a ComplexValue region in the data gramar, but for simple types, the term "simple value region" actually means not only the region explicitly named "SimpleValue", but also NilLogicalValue, and NilLiteralValue (but only where it is used in simple-type grammar productions.

This suggests these additional changes:

Split NilLiteralValue to SimpleNilLiteralValue and ComplexNilLiteralValue

Rename the current SimpleValue to SimpleNormalValue,

Define SimpleLogicalValue as SimpleNormalValue | NilLogicalValue

Then we have no misleading grammar region named SimpleValue, so the term "simple value region" can be defined to mean
SimpleLogicalValue or SimpleNilLiteralValue.

We can't actually create a grammar production for SimpleValue because SimpleLogicalValue and SimpleNilLiteralValue don't appear in the data grammar at the same places, so no single production would capture the grammar restrictions properly.

But we can define what we mean by "simple value" crisply, which will serve our needs for desribing what dfdl:valueLength does.