Storing xs:any fields via DSP

Question

Hello everyone, I'm glad to see DSP back in business :)
In a project for a customer we're preparing order management system, used to perform process operations on ALSB/DSP sets of services. It is based on WLI/ALSB/DSP/ORA infrastructure.
Order schema is composed of few typed elements (orderId, orderDate, and so on) and one untyped (xs:any) orderHeader element - for storing xml document of unknown structure (in fact, structures are known, but very different for different orders), mapped to database type of CLOB (or very large string).
There comes the question: how can we perform insert / update operations via DSP on such a structure, WITHOUT losing the xml markup in the orderHeader field after storing in Oracle? What we have now is working physical and logical services, with one glitch: <orderHeader><test><field1>1</field1><field2>2</field2></test></orderHeader> get inserted and updated like this: ORDER_HEADER = "12".
Anyone, any ideas how to push the XML markup through the service?
Best regards,
Norbert

Answer 1

fn-bea:serialize($order) will string-ify your Order element and you can store that in a CLOB/String. And to turn the string into typed XML use validate{ fn-bea:inlinedXML( $string )  } (you will need to have a schema matching that type in your dataspace else validation/typing will fail).
However - you might want to revisit your architecture. XML stored in database strings is inefficient. It would be difficult to use such a column as an index, or to even perform a simple selection on it (for ORDER_ID=123, for instance - you would have to hope that <ORDER_ID>123</ORDER_ID> didn't occur in a product name within the order. To select on any XML would require DSP reading all the rows in that table, turning them into XML and then evaluating the selection.