Re: Redeclaring attribute in derived type

Hi Jesse,

>>I don't see anything stopping you from doing that - it would have
>>the same effect as a fixed value constraint, in terms of validation,
>>though it wouldn't report the same PSVI.
>
> You mean I will have to include the attribute in the instance
> document, correct?

Yes, that's right.

>>I think the reason that ID attributes aren't permitted value
>>constraints is that it would easily lead to two elements having the
>>same ID, which is of course illegal in XML. But I can see that there
>>might be uses for it - if you wanted to make sure that you only ever
>>had one element of that particular type in the document, for
>>example.
>
> That was the only rationale I could imagine. That is exactly the use
> I have in mind -- to ensure that there is only a single element of
> the given type in the document.

I assume that this element could appear just about anywhere (otherwise
you could probably constrain it more easily using content models)?

Another approach that you could use would be to use a different type
for the id attribute (e.g. xs:Name) and create an identity constraint
with xs:key within the declaration for the document element, something
like:

  <xs:key name="uniqueElement">
    <xs:selector xpath=".//elementName" />
    <xs:field xpath="@id" />
  </xs:key>

(This says that within the document, every element called
'elementName' has to have a unique value for its id attribute.)

Since this doesn't use xs:ID as the attribute type, this would enable
you to use 'fixed' to fix the value of the id attribute.
  
> By the way, what software would you recommend for schema validation,
> either locally or online? For obvious reasons I have lost confidence
> in the XSV validator available via the web.

Well, Xerces-C++ and now Xerces-J v2 claim to cover all of XML Schema
now. I haven't tried Xerces-J yet, but I haven't yet come across
anything that Xerces-C++ doesn't handle. Those are both from
xml.apache.org.

There's also MSXML4 (although that implementation is still a bit
dodgy, particularly with identity constraints) and MSV (multi-schema
validator from
http://www.sun.com/software/xml/developers/multischema/).

I think it's a good idea at the moment to have a range of validators
to try things out with.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/

Received on Sunday, 23 December 2001 07:49:40 UTC