[xquery-talk] XML Query Test Suite version 0.8.6

[Martin Probst]

Hi,

> I'm a bit surprised by the format of the new external variable tests, I
> put some comments in bugzilla

The surprising thing is that most of the tests make no use of this, ie
extvardeclwithtype-2:

> declare variable $x as xs:date external;
> 
> fn:string($x)

With x being bound to this:

> "2006-02-07Z"

Which is clearly an xs:string, even though it has the lexical format of
an xs:date. In X-Hive it's not a problem to bind these results to the
variable, but of course it gives errors because the input value is not
an xs:date. 

Does the test suite expect implementations to cast input values to the
required type? I don't read the spec like that, and I also don't read
the Test Suite Documentation like that ... can someone clarify?


> I don't know if it's just me, and other implementors wil have no problem
> with these...

Well, we don't - in X-Hive you can easily "chain" XQueries together,
plus we also have a Java API giving access to the datamodel types. The
problem is that the test suite doesn't specify a format for that - this
also causes most of the problems with badly escaped XML results and
number formats.

Martin