XMLSchema pictures

As I look into whether I can follow XMLSchema's picture and regular expression
support for validating string content, I have noticed that the following cannot
easily be modelled. I thought I'd pass along these comments as they may be
relevant to others:

(1) numerics:
I wish to specify that the string value can have values like "123.45" for
positive and "(123.45)" for negatives. There does not seem to be a way to
specify the optional appearance of the brackets (see Java's DoubleFormat for how
Java lets you specify numeric formats).

I wish to be able to specify values such as "12,34" and "1234,"
(comma-as-decimal), "1 000 000" (space as grouping character)

(2) booleans:
Boolean characters in pictures are limited to "0" and "1". I may wish to have
y/n, yes/no, true/false, t/f. I suppose these could be done with regular
expressions, but picture support would be more convenient.

(3) strings:
Picture support for leading/trailing blanks/zeroes would be nice. Some former
fixed-length protocols which are moving toward XML may have leading and trailing
blanks or zeroes in data.

I think some of these problems arise from having to specify a character code for
each character in the picture. It almost seems like the picture support and the
regular expression support would be useful if combined into one mechanism.

My two cents worth...

Debbie Smith
Sybase

Received on Wednesday, 30 June 1999 15:55:45 UTC