Um, can you make it do this...?

W3C Schema Team,

I am currently in the middle of the requirements for an XML implementation
at Pegasus Systems. We do millions of transactions a day for hotel
reservation systems as well as travel agents and the like (www.travelweb.com
is a "pretty" HTML front end of our transaction processing if you would like
some reference point). I would like to make a relatively simple suggestion
(I am sure this has already been debated to some extent...)

I NEED to be able to restrict a string to a range of lengths. For example, I
have a field in out Transaction Interface which can be from 2 to 4
characters long (yes it is a snazzy legacy string format). From the 05NOV99
spec it seems that I only have length (fixed length only) or maxLength (from
1 to X) to manage the length of a string. Since my minimum length for the
field is 2 characters, it leaves a small hole that will undoubtedly come
back to haunt me. 

I was thinking that I might be able to address this with the regular
expression facilities depending on the implementation, however I could also
see the usefulness of being able to specify minLength, maxLength, and/or
length. It seems kind of silly to have just length and maxLength, given that
XML Schema will be used for damn near everything under the sun...

The standards look great and thanks for all the work!!!

Regards,

Stuart Stephens

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Received on Wednesday, 1 December 1999 11:39:34 UTC