Full-Fidelity Flexible Object-Oriented XML Access

Developers need to programmatically access persistent XML data. Object-oriented access is often the preferred method. Translating XML data into objects or vice-versa is a hard problem due to the data model mismatch and the difficulty of query translation. We propose a framework that addresses this problem by transforming object-based queries and updates into queries and updates on XML using flexible, declarative mappings between classes and XML schema types. The same mappings are used to shred XML fragments from query results into client-side objects. Information in the XML store that is not mapped using the mapping language, such as comments and processing instructions, are also made available in the object representation.