Completing support for markdown in metaschema-driven conversions

[wendellpiez]

User Story:

Operating OSCAL tools, I can convert XML into an equivalent JSON representation, which includes blocks of prose represented in markdown. Current OSCAL tooling (XSLTs produced from metaschemas) can produce markdown embedded in JSON produced from XML, but not XML from its JSON/markdown equivalent.

A draft XSLT exists to perform this conversion or most of it, but it has not integrated or stress-tested much.

For the promise of (constrained but lossless) bidirectional conversion between XML and JSON to be realized, we have to demonstrate this capability in any metaschema-driven conversion pathway.

Goals:

When a JSON->XML conversion script (XSLT) is produced from a metaschema, it must be able to parse and convert markdown (within boundaries defined for OSCAL markdown) into OSCAL XML equivalents.

We should be able to demonstrate this capability with some testing samples representing a range of inputs.

Dependencies:

• A specification for OSCAL markdown and its mapping into OSCAL XML as "OSCAL prose", an HTML subset. (Somewhere we have a sketch of this.)
• XSLT to do this job generically (a prototype can be found in my repository)
• Testing samples of OSCAL (any variety valid to a metaschema) in XML and JSON, with examples of prose showing markdown

Acceptance Criteria

• We can show successful examples (tests and/or real data) demonstrating full bi-directional conversion of XML and JSON including the parts of OSCAL that use markdown on the JSON side (nominally 'prose' in metaschema)
• We can show the scripts (XSLTs) that perform these conversions are produced for particular OSCAL formats from their respective metaschemas.

[wendellpiez]

This picks up from Issue #200.

[david-waltermire]

#200 provides good sources of documentation for this issue.

[wendellpiez]

This is tied to #284. Adding it to Sprint 21. Not far from done.

[iMichaela]

5/23/2019

The development has been done. we need to test it (@wendellpiez will do the initial testing but everyone in the team is encouraged to test it.) The test can be done as part of the pipeline XML->JSON -> XML with markdown included. It is expected the markdown and XML to be the same. @howieavp76 will make up some samples for testing it. @wendellpiez and @howieavp76 will meet Friday to work on it.

[david-waltermire]

Done.