The presence of the xsd:nillable attribute in an XSD element means that the corresponding element in the XML file permits null values.
Setting java.property.tibco.be.schema.nil.attribs=true in
designer.tra causes the
xsd:nillable attribute (
"xsd:nillable=true") to be set on all elements in the BusinessEvents concept XSD. When an element in the XML file generated using that XSD has a null value, the
xsi:nil="true" attribute is set on that element.
When set to false, the xsd:nillable attribute is not added and the corresponding XML file does not treat empty elements as null values.
In the absence of the xsd:nillable attribute in the XSD element, a corresponding empty element in the XML file is assumed to have a value. Elements that have no value are treated as empty strings (
"").
Setting the following property to false in the TIBCO Designer TRA file causes properties with null values to be included in the XML representation of a concept:
Suppose a Customer concept instance has no value for its CustomerName property. By default, the
CustomerName property is excluded from the XML output. The output might look like the following:
If null properties are excluded when concepts are serialized, the java.property.tibco.be.schema.nil.attribs property has no effect on concept serialization.
The output for the Customer concept instance shown above would be as follows, where there is no value for the
CustomerName element in the concept instance:
If you enable null values to be output to XML (see Enabling Null Property Values to Appear When Serializing Concepts to XML), then you may also want to configure additional properties for defining how to treat null values for numeric types, as explained in this section.
BusinessEvents does not implicitly support null values for numeric types. This can lead to interoperability issues when working with external sources, such as databases, which do permit blank (null) values.
To address such issues, you can enable special treatment of numeric null values at design time. At runtime, BusinessEvents then uses a special numeric value for each numeric datatype to represent a null value. Default special values are provided and you can override the defaults at runtime (see
Table 10, Properties for Null Property Handling).
The special numeric values that indicate null are used in BusinessEvents when serializing and deserializing a concept to and from its XML representation, and when performing various operations on database concepts and the database tables to which they are linked.
The special numeric values that indicate null appear only in BusinessEvents. The appropriate null value is used in the XML or database representation of the concept property.
Conversely, when deserializing or importing a concept instance, BusinessEvents represents numeric null values using the special numeric values that indicate null in the concept instance.
This section provides the procedure for setting properties in the TIBCO Designer properties file to set all properties described earlier in this section. After you change any of these properties, you must rebuild and redeploy the EAR file for the project.
Set the following properties in the designer.tra file as needed to configure the output for your needs before you generate the EAR file.