Multivalued Attribute sets

Hugh_Ferguson

To start, a short question: Are multivalued attribute sets supported? i.e. if you have an attribute set with 4 integer attributes representing co-ordinates (lat degrees, lat minutes, long degrees, long minutes), and you allow the category to contain more than one set of coordinates, are you supposed to be able to set these programmatically with Web Services?  I suspect that you cannot.

Now the details of why I ask:  I've observed that the AttributeGroup object (effectively like .fData in a category definition) has a Values array with a DataValue object for each attribute in the category. Each DataValue (String, Boolean, Date, Integer, or Set) has a Values array. That Values array is typically a string, int, boolean, or date value array, but in the case of sets it is a set of RowValue Objects.  Now here is where it gets interesting.  The RowValue object contains a Values array laid out much like the AttributeGroup.Values, that is it contains a DataValue object for each attribute value (anyone who knows Oscript and the layout of the Category defintion and data structures should find this all eerily familiar).  Now the problem is that If your set defaults to 1 value, you will only have one value to populate. Only if you have your attribute set *BY DEFAULT* have more than one value will the additional RowValues be available to populate.

I tried to work around this by cloning the original row value object, setting the attribute values inside of it, then appending it to my TableValue.Values array.  I can see it establishing. When I do this, I get two rows for my attribute set, but for some reason, the second row is just a copy of the first (my initial cloning of the original row used the serialize and deserialize method to make a deep copy).  I suspect that just cloning the object isn't enough because now your keys won't have the right row information in them.

Has anyone attempted to set multi-valued attribute sets in Web Services, or am I truly on the bleeding edge??

-Hugh

Kyle_Swidrovich

I think you're the first, Hugh

Did you get this to work?

To clone the row value, you'd do something like this, assuming that "v" is the RowValue object you're cloning:

RowValue v2 = new RowValue();
v2.Key = v.Key
v2.Description = v.Description;

if (v.Values != null)
{
  int len = v.Values.Length;
  v2.Values = new PrimitiveValue[len];
  for (int i=0; i<len; i++)
  {
    v2.Values[i] = (PrimitiveValue)cloneDataValue(v.Values[i]);
  }
}

The helper function cloneDataValue would be responsible for cloning the value given the specific type of the value (i.e., detect the type and redirect to code that can copy a date, copy a string, etc.)