XmlSchemaInterface

When using arrays, we could represent XML data in a number of different ways.

For example, given the following XML data strucutre:

This could be:

[ 'id' => 1, 'name' => 'doc', 'foobars' => [ [ 'id' => '123', 'name' => 'blah', 'widgets' => [ [ 'foo' => 'a', 'bar' => 'b', 'baz' => 'c', ] ], ], ] ]

The challenge is more in going from an array back to the more structured xml format. Note that any given key => string mapping could represent either an attribute, or a simple XML element containing only a string value. In general, we do not want to add extra layers of nesting in the data structure to disambiguate between these kinds of data, as we want the source data to render cleanly into other formats, e.g. yaml, json, et. al., and we do not want to force every data provider to have to consider the optimal xml schema for their data.

Our strategy, therefore, is to expect clients that wish to provide a very specific xml representation to return a DOMDocument, and, for other data structures where xml is a secondary concern, then we will use some default heuristics to convert from arrays to xml.