Extensibility Question

All,
     I'm a relative newbie to XSDL (but an experienced markup developer),
so kindly excuse my ignorance if it should rear it's ugly head. I'm
developing a system interface schema and we'd like to leverage XSDL's
potential for datatype validation. For "internal" processes we have a
generic structure containing parameters, where each parameter has
attributes for name, type and direction (essentially name/value pairs).
Like so:

<parameter name="input1" datatype="Int" direction="In">
     <value>1</value>
</parameter>
<parameter name="output1" datatype="Int" direction="Out">
     <value>2</value>
</parameter>

 This is fine for our puposes, but when we add external interfaces into the
mix we'll need to support more complex data exchange requirements. Most
likely, each interface will use its own schema, which can't be shoe-horned
in to our parameter structure (mostly because they'll want to validate
their datatypes at the parser level). While this is unavoidable, I'd prefer
that every interface used the rest of our mesasge framework so that we can
standardize on ways to handle things like authentication information. So
I'm considering doing something in my schema like (pseudo-spec):

<choice>
   <!element name="parameters"/>
   <any namespace=""##other"/>
</choice>

Any thoughts on whether this would be good, bad, done better some other way
would be most appreciated. TIA.

Michael A. Rossi
Computer Sciences Corporation
mailto:mrossi@csc.com
856-983-4400 x4964

Received on Tuesday, 6 August 2002 14:35:16 UTC