Quartz Composer - Structure Key Member bug?

Question

I'm trying to use Quartz Composer to create a continuous integration build radiator.

I put together a simple XML file to describe the projects and the latest success of each of their workflows:

<projects>
  <project>
    <title>Project A</title>
    <workflows>
      <workflow>
        <title>Build 1.0</title>
        <status>success</status>
      </workflow>
      <workflow>
        <title>Build 2.0</title>
        <status>success</status>
      </workflow>
    </workflows>
  </project>
  <project>
    <title>Project B</title>
    <workflows>
      <workflow>
        <title>Build 1.0</title>
        <status>success</status>
      </workflow>
    </workflows>
  </project>
</projects>

This will obviously have more information but I'm just trying to get the basics working for now. I set up a composition and am using XML Downloader to load the above XML file from the filesystem.

The problem I'm having is thus: when I use the Structure Key Member patch on an element with multiple children, I get back multiple children BUT when I use Structure Key Member on an element with just one child I get back the single child instead of a collection of 1 item.

I've illustrated the problem below in an example composition:

Am I doing something wrong? Is this expected behavior? Why isn't the lower chain not also returning a QCStructure?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the XML Downloader patch doesn't properly handle multiple adjacent empty elements.

One possible workaround might be to restructure your XML to remove the "projects" group, and just make "project" a property of each "workflow":

<workflows>
  <workflow project="Project A">
    <title>Build 1.0</title>
    <status>success</status>
  </workflow>
  <workflow project="Project A">
    <title>Build 2.0</title>
    <status>success</status>
  </workflow>
  <workflow project="Project B">
    <title>Build 1.0</title>
    <status>success</status>
  </workflow>
</workflows>

This produces a structure with usable results.

(When XML Downloader builds a structure from XML, attributes are equivalent to child tags, so "project" could be either and you'd get the same result.)