XSD ???
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I'm spending a lot of time with XML nowadays and I'm interested to know if anyone actually uses XSD's in their work situation ? Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
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I'm spending a lot of time with XML nowadays and I'm interested to know if anyone actually uses XSD's in their work situation ? Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Yes, we use it as the offical schema format. "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
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Yes, we use it as the offical schema format. "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
Is your schema exposed externally ? I'm just curious because XSD's seem quite complex, the XSD for our format would surely take at least a day to write and I'm not sure I see the benefits for our application. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
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Is your schema exposed externally ? I'm just curious because XSD's seem quite complex, the XSD for our format would surely take at least a day to write and I'm not sure I see the benefits for our application. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Christian Graus wrote: Is your schema exposed externally ? Not to be to evasive but I could answer this either way. For the matter of this discussion yes it is exposed. I.E. an authorized customer or supplier company can (when we open the server access) access the schemas to validate the data as well as us use it to validate what is submited to us. Christian Graus wrote: I'm just curious because XSD's seem quite complex, the XSD for our format would surely take at least a day to write and I'm not sure I see the benefits for our application. Yes any schema will take some time. Especially since you seldom get it right the first time (i.e. do you really cover all of the options you are expecting to. However I think XSD's ar better than DTD's. So the question is do you need a schema? I strongly recommend doing so if just for documenting your work. If this is all you need using one of the generation tools is good. I am using Authority from Tibco (formerly Extensibility). I think is you just get the schema tool it is only $100 US and is well worth the money. I have the TurboXML suite. If all of your data transmitals are internal this is not as important as you can include testing to ensure compatiblity. But once you transmite or recieve data from other this is beyond your internal testing limits. REF: http://www.tibco.com/solutions/products/extensibility/turbo\_xml.jsp I did not see authority listed by itself but you may want to check it out. The one big negative is it is java based so a little slow. "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
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Christian Graus wrote: Is your schema exposed externally ? Not to be to evasive but I could answer this either way. For the matter of this discussion yes it is exposed. I.E. an authorized customer or supplier company can (when we open the server access) access the schemas to validate the data as well as us use it to validate what is submited to us. Christian Graus wrote: I'm just curious because XSD's seem quite complex, the XSD for our format would surely take at least a day to write and I'm not sure I see the benefits for our application. Yes any schema will take some time. Especially since you seldom get it right the first time (i.e. do you really cover all of the options you are expecting to. However I think XSD's ar better than DTD's. So the question is do you need a schema? I strongly recommend doing so if just for documenting your work. If this is all you need using one of the generation tools is good. I am using Authority from Tibco (formerly Extensibility). I think is you just get the schema tool it is only $100 US and is well worth the money. I have the TurboXML suite. If all of your data transmitals are internal this is not as important as you can include testing to ensure compatiblity. But once you transmite or recieve data from other this is beyond your internal testing limits. REF: http://www.tibco.com/solutions/products/extensibility/turbo\_xml.jsp I did not see authority listed by itself but you may want to check it out. The one big negative is it is java based so a little slow. "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
Michael A. Barnhart wrote: However I think XSD's ar better than DTD's. Yes, they appear to be. Internally, for documentation, we just create an empty XML document. Michael A. Barnhart wrote: I am using Authority from Tibco (formerly Extensibility). How do these tools handle things like multiple nodes and minimum/maximum value/counts ? Do they take a number of documents to validate against ? Michael A. Barnhart wrote: If all of your data transmitals are internal this is not as important as you can include testing to ensure compatiblity. But once you transmite or recieve data from other this is beyond your internal testing limits. Yes, that's basically what I thought. I'm asking from the perspective of writing a wrapper for XML in C#, and an editor for XML/XSL and XSD's, and I just wondered how useful they are in the 'real' world. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
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Michael A. Barnhart wrote: However I think XSD's ar better than DTD's. Yes, they appear to be. Internally, for documentation, we just create an empty XML document. Michael A. Barnhart wrote: I am using Authority from Tibco (formerly Extensibility). How do these tools handle things like multiple nodes and minimum/maximum value/counts ? Do they take a number of documents to validate against ? Michael A. Barnhart wrote: If all of your data transmitals are internal this is not as important as you can include testing to ensure compatiblity. But once you transmite or recieve data from other this is beyond your internal testing limits. Yes, that's basically what I thought. I'm asking from the perspective of writing a wrapper for XML in C#, and an editor for XML/XSL and XSD's, and I just wondered how useful they are in the 'real' world. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Christian Graus wrote: How do these tools handle things like multiple nodes and minimum/maximum value/counts ? Very easy. You just edit the general properties (i.e. required, optional, repeatable and then switch to a source mode where you can edit the individual values for min and max occurance (default is unbounded for max and 0 for min if optional and repeatable are set. Christian Graus wrote: Do they take a number of documents to validate against ? I am not sure I am understanding this question. This generates the schemas. It does not do the validation. The validating parser would do this step. Christian Graus wrote: I'm asking from the perspective of writing a wrapper for XML in C#, and an editor for XML/XSL and XSD's, and I just wondered how useful they are in the 'real' world. Yes they are useful in the real world. This will grow in the next several years. Right now the user authorization and validation for things like Web Services needs to be handled. At that point the need for these tools will grow as these services grow to be more than just demos (or in closed access as mine are). You have to ask your self how much is this going to cost vs buying what is available. For me the tools were to cheap to keep updating our work. "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
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Christian Graus wrote: How do these tools handle things like multiple nodes and minimum/maximum value/counts ? Very easy. You just edit the general properties (i.e. required, optional, repeatable and then switch to a source mode where you can edit the individual values for min and max occurance (default is unbounded for max and 0 for min if optional and repeatable are set. Christian Graus wrote: Do they take a number of documents to validate against ? I am not sure I am understanding this question. This generates the schemas. It does not do the validation. The validating parser would do this step. Christian Graus wrote: I'm asking from the perspective of writing a wrapper for XML in C#, and an editor for XML/XSL and XSD's, and I just wondered how useful they are in the 'real' world. Yes they are useful in the real world. This will grow in the next several years. Right now the user authorization and validation for things like Web Services needs to be handled. At that point the need for these tools will grow as these services grow to be more than just demos (or in closed access as mine are). You have to ask your self how much is this going to cost vs buying what is available. For me the tools were to cheap to keep updating our work. "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
Michael A. Barnhart wrote: I am not sure I am understanding this question. What I meant was, if I accepted three XML documents, I could extrapolate from that how often a node must appear, and how often it may appear. It would provide the range needed to do that stuff automatically. You've been most helpful - thanks. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
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Michael A. Barnhart wrote: I am not sure I am understanding this question. What I meant was, if I accepted three XML documents, I could extrapolate from that how often a node must appear, and how often it may appear. It would provide the range needed to do that stuff automatically. You've been most helpful - thanks. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Christian Graus wrote: It would provide the range needed to do that stuff automatically. For this set of tools it would just give you (0 or 1) min and unbounded for the max if the data had multiple entries. It would not give you say 1 to 5 for the range. But that is a very easy edit to go change. Good Luck, Mike "If I won't be myself, who will?" Alfred Hitchcock
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I'm spending a lot of time with XML nowadays and I'm interested to know if anyone actually uses XSD's in their work situation ? Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Use it extensively. It provides several purposes, the main being that one can validate their XML and the other being that if your project is related to transfer of data between departments or organizations then the XSD serves as fantastic documentation. Also XML authoring tools like XML spy use the XSD to help you with your XML. It will provide you with options, choices, valid data etc.
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Michael A. Barnhart wrote: I am not sure I am understanding this question. What I meant was, if I accepted three XML documents, I could extrapolate from that how often a node must appear, and how often it may appear. It would provide the range needed to do that stuff automatically. You've been most helpful - thanks. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Christian Graus wrote: I could extrapolate from that how often a node must appear, and how often it may appear. It would provide the range needed to do that stuff automatically. XML Spy v4.4[^] can do this BTW.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa -
I'm spending a lot of time with XML nowadays and I'm interested to know if anyone actually uses XSD's in their work situation ? Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Christian Graus wrote: I'm spending a lot of time with XML nowadays and I'm interested to know if anyone actually uses XSD's in their work situation ? If by XSD you mean the W3C XML Schema then yes. But admitedly at the moment we use both DTDs and XSDs. For the simpler projects DTDs are much easier and suffice, for the more complex projects then we go XSD. One of the best benefits of XSD IMO is that it is an XML document itself, unlike a DTD. This proves very useful when doing dynamic processing of an XML schema. With a DTD you have to do some manual parsing which is a pain, but with an XSD you can use a normal XML parser to do the grunt work for you. I really hope the W3C convert all their schemas over to XSD soon so that I can actually make use of them properly :) And of course with XSD you get proper types (e.g. string, number etc.) which is very important. While they are more complex to create they are far more powerful and actually once you get into a lot more logical than DTDs. The usual XML well-formed rules apply and you can even validate an XSD against another to ensure the new XSD is valid. As mentioned in the other post XML Spy 4.4 is quite handy with XSD documents.
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa -
I'm spending a lot of time with XML nowadays and I'm interested to know if anyone actually uses XSD's in their work situation ? Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
This tool might be useful: http://puvogel.informatik.med.uni-giessen.de/dtd2xs/[^]
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Michael A. Barnhart wrote: However I think XSD's ar better than DTD's. Yes, they appear to be. Internally, for documentation, we just create an empty XML document. Michael A. Barnhart wrote: I am using Authority from Tibco (formerly Extensibility). How do these tools handle things like multiple nodes and minimum/maximum value/counts ? Do they take a number of documents to validate against ? Michael A. Barnhart wrote: If all of your data transmitals are internal this is not as important as you can include testing to ensure compatiblity. But once you transmite or recieve data from other this is beyond your internal testing limits. Yes, that's basically what I thought. I'm asking from the perspective of writing a wrapper for XML in C#, and an editor for XML/XSL and XSD's, and I just wondered how useful they are in the 'real' world. Christian Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002 Cats, and most other animals apart from mad cows can write fully functional vb code. - Simon Walton - 6-Aug-2002
Christian Graus wrote: Yes, that's basically what I thought. I'm asking from the perspective of writing a wrapper for XML in C#, and an editor for XML/XSL and XSD's, and I just wondered how useful they are in the 'real' world. Just to follow up on your question about use in the real world, I was working on a project recently that used web services to communicate with a database. The project had a thin oo wrapping around what I required of the xml, and this wrapping layer of classes required certain values from the xml it was given. Rather than doing all the validation within the wrapping classes (and therefore making them more cumbersome), a schema (XSD) was created to validate the xml before it was passed to the wrapper. This way we got good feedback in the form of exceptions when the xml didn't conform to the requirements of the wrapping environment. Also, I did at one point have plans to automatically generate the wrapper classes from the schema itself, and so solve the maintainance time of keeping a schema up to date. The other side issue that arose was that the schema ment that (as another poster has already noted) we had a common interface for parallel development - much like an Interface would do for a Class with pre and post conditions, we used the XSD for the XML. Hope this helps Ben
