GetChildElements erroneously returns <UNINITIALIZED>

Archived
1

Hi,

My app downloads and parses some XML that contains


...
    <categoryList>
        <category>Name1</category>
        <category>Name2</category>
        <category>Name3</category>
    </categoryList>

And successfully parses down to


    if posterItem.Getname() = "categoryList" then
        categoryItems = posterItem.GetChildElements()
        for each categoryItem in categoryItems
            ' CRASH: categoryItem = <UNINITIALIZED>
            print categoryItem.GetName()

The problem is that when I print categoryItems from the dubugger, I get 3 valid children whose names match the expected category names. But when I try to iterate over categoryItems using for each, it always prepends three values before the valid values.


Brightscript Debugger> p categoryItems
<Component: roXMLElement>
<Component: roXMLElement>
<Component: roXMLElement>

Brightscript Debugger> p foreach categoryItem in categoryItems
<UNINITIALIZED><UNINITIALIZED><UNINITIALIZED><Component: roXMLElement>
<Component: roXMLElement>
<Component: roXMLElement>

Does anyone know why that may be, and how I could fix or workaround the problem or detect the error upstream? I don’t see any problem with the XML itself.

2

This seems to be a problem with the debugger but not with the language. The failure happens when you run the foreach statement in the debugger, but it seems to work ok when compiled into a channel. This works for me:


string ="<list><c>name1</c><c>name2</c><c>name3</c></list>"
xml = createobject("roXMLElement")
if not xml.Parse(string) then stop
categoryItems = xml.getChildElements()
for each categoryItem in categoryItems
    print categoryItem.GetName()
end for

This prints


c
c
c

–Mark

3

Hm, actually I can’t reproduce the problem with the debugger either. Can you give a complete example of how to reproduce it?

–Mark

4

Hi, thanks for the quick reply. I was going to send the sample offline, but was able to sanitize it enough to post here (for everyone’s benefit).


Sub Main()
    rsp = "<menutree><roPosterScreen><categoryList><category>1</category><category>2</category><category>3</category></categoryList></roPosterScreen></menutree>"    xml=CreateObject("roXMLElement")
    xml.Parse(rsp)
    
    rokumenu = xml.GetChildElements()
    for each element in rokumenu
        if element.GetName() = "roPosterScreen" then
            posterScreen = element.GetBody()
        endif
    next
    
    for each posterItem in posterScreen
        if posterItem.GetName() = "categoryList" then
            categoryItems = posterItem.GetChildElements()
            for each catgoryItem in categoryItems
                print "categoryItem: " + categoryItem.GetName()
                if categoryItem.GetName() = "category" then
                    print "Push " + categoryItem.GetBody()
                endif
            next
        endif
    next
End Sub
5

Hm this is a strange one. Simply changing the names of two variables (categoryItems → cs and categoryItem → c) seems to fix the problem. I’ve filed a bug on this and we will investigate.

–Mark

6

Thanks! That workaround works for me as well.