Re: Ignore Order while validating XSD

Apart from being a best practice, cd somebody tell me atleast five
advantages of enforcing order of elements within an XSD. I am talking about
scenario where Users freshly define the XSDs, and then go on to define the
XML isntances out of this XSD.[apart from defining schemas for existing XML
instances which have no definition, or have a DTD definition].

Quoting Mukul,
>Presently the XML Schema spec says following about the all group "All
>the elements in the group may appear once or not at all, and they may
>appear in any order". I think its a good idea to remove the
>restriction of "once or not at all", and allow any number of
>instances.
This is definitely the way to go !

-Menon


On 2/20/06, Ralf Lammel <Ralf.Lammel@microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Mukul wrote:
>
> > If you have 10 or more elements,
> > then definitely the approach I suggested would be cumbersome.
>
> SET FUN=ON
>
> "cumbersome" is a proper understatement. The number of permutations over a
> finite set S is |S|!. We would get that many sequence compositors if we used
> the naïve, UPA-violating approach, plus 1 choice compositor. Just to recall
> figures:
>
> 10! + 1 = 3,628,801
>
> I doubt that there is that much business-critical XSD in this world, as of
> writing. The biggest real-world schema that I have seen has less than 20,000
> compositors -- a factor 181 difference.
>
> But then again, naïve enumeration of permutations is not valid XSD anyhow.
> One would hope that left factorization recovers scalability a bit, but it is
> the other way around. Let s_i denote the number of sequence compositors for
> the left-factorization approach; let c_i denote the number of choice
> compositors for the left-factorization approach, where i denotes the number
> of element particles to be varied. Here are some observations to be made by
> looking at the examples we have seen in earlier emails:
>
> - s_1 = 1, c_1 = 0
> - s_2 = 2, c_2 = 1
> - s_3 = 6, c_3 = 4
>
> Here are the progressions:
>
> s_1 = 1
> s_{i+1} = (i+1) * s_i
>
> c_1 = 0
> c_{i+1} = (i+1) * c_i + 1
>
> Hence, just the s_i part is the factorial alone.
> And c_i's growth isn't much less that s_i's.
>
> I think it is an advanced homework question to figure out an XSD
> representation scheme for permutation phrases (without using xs:all) that
> uses less "compositors in code" than the plain left-factorization approach.
> One could try to further factor out commonalities into group definitions, or
> what? Whatever you find, the representation scheme will be *cumbersome* for
> 4, masochistic for 5, academic from there on, and certainly require a good
> hard disk for 10. Someone might even propose to write a generator that
> implements the scheme. Then, two permutation phrases over 7 particles would
> generate more or less as much code as the size of the biggest real-world
> schema that I have seen so far.
>
> SET FUN=OFF
>
> We should also note that manual elimination of permutation phrases gets
> slightly more complicated once minOccurs=0 constraints were involved. My
> very personal impression is that an XSD 1.0 follow-up should either get
> rid of xs:all or define it in some generality. Remember xs:all isn't used a
> lot in real-world schemas. In the schema study of [1] we found that all the
> 63 schemas used 40 xs:all's (0.07% of all compositors that we
> encountered).
>
> Ralf
>
> [1] Analysis of XML schema usage, http://homepages.cwi.nl/~ralf/xml05/
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmlschema-dev-request@w3.org [mailto:xmlschema-dev-request@w3.org]
> > On Behalf Of Mukul Gandhi
> > Sent: Sunday, February 19, 2006 9:35 AM
> > To: Ramkumar Menon
> > Cc: xmlschema-dev@w3.org
> > Subject: Re: Ignore Order while validating XSD
> >
> >
> > I am not sure how difficult it is to support this scenario within XSD.
> > The XSD validator vendors are the right people to comment on this.
> >
> > The XML Schema spec says "The choice group element allows only one of
> > its children to appear in an instance". So I think the XSD validator
> > should support the example I posted. If you have 10 or more elements,
> > then definitely the approach I suggested would be cumbersome.
> >
> > Presently the XML Schema spec says following about the all group "All
> > the elements in the group may appear once or not at all, and they may
> > appear in any order". I think its a good idea to remove the
> > restriction of "once or not at all", and allow any number of
> > instances.
> >
> > Regards,
> > Mukul
> >
> > On 2/19/06, Ramkumar Menon <ramkumar.menon@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Thanks, Mukul.
> > > Is there any special reason why such a simple scenario is so complex
> to
> > > support witihn XSD ? The suggestion below definitely seems good, but a
> > > schema with 10 or more elements [which is the case with my scenario]
> > looks
> > > very complex - visually at least - and loses readability.
> > > rgds,
> > > Menon
>
>


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-Ramkumar Menon
A typical Macroprocessor