IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Programming IBM BPM > Business objects programming > Programming techniques
Resolving property names that contain periods
Property names in an XSD may contain a period (".") as one of many valid characters, while in a SDO they are also used to show indexing in a property of multiple cardinality. This may cause resolution problems in certain situations.
Property names in Service Data Objects (SDOs) are based on the names of the elements and attribute that are generated from in the XSD. Business objects will handle the "." character properly, with one exception: if an XSD has a single cardinality property named "<name>.<#>" and a multiple cardinality property named "<name>".
An XPath such as "foo.0" would not resolve properly if there is a single cardinality property named "foo.0" and multiple cardinality property named "foo". In this case, the single cardinality Property named "foo.0" would be the one resolved. Although this should be a rare occurrence, you can avoid it entirely if you use the "foo[1]" syntax to access their multiple cardinality property. SDOs will not support the "." syntax for indexing, so you should use the "[]" for indexing.
- Serializing and deserializing unions with xsi:type
In XSD, a union is a way to merge the lexical spaces of several simple datatypes known as members.