model.to_xml does not generate all type attributes

What where you expecting ? and ?

I was expecting to see the following for the name and description elements:

<people>

<person>

  <description type="text" >This is a test</description>

  ...

  <name type="string">Conrad</name>

</person>

<description type="text">This is yet another test 2.</description>

...

<name type="string">Conrad</name>

They're both just plain text data. the type atribute isn't supposed to replicate the database schema, ie you see integer not bigint(12) so that whatever is reading the xml knows how to interpret the plain text content. In the case where the content is just plain text we don't need to say anything.

OK, why do we have some type attributes for some elements and no type attributes for others? Next, the generated XML appears to simply display what's contained in the schema.rb file. The :skip_type option is set to false by default from reading the documentation. In any case, I was thinking about using this generated XML file with it's type attribute to populate a Gemstone/S database.

I believe the only type without attributes are the ones which are purely textual in nature (and if you look at the source this is quite deliberate). I know nothing about gemstone/S but when loading a record does it really care about whether the value came from a text column or a varchar column ?

Why even define the type attribute when generating XML? The type of an XML field can be determined or selected from an XML Schema.

That's why skip_types is there I suppose. On the other why not be helpful when there is no xsd / client doesn't support xsd/ you can't be bother with an xsd.

OK, that's fair enough.