Re: extending schema

Well, I'm not sure I can give you a detailed answer without seeing your 
specific schema documents, but I can point you in a general direction. 
Taking one aspect of your requirement, your original XML document has 
<body> defined without the new attributes, and the modified one adds the 
attributes.  As you should be aware if you're using the schema language, 
every element is declared with a type, and in your example we can 
reasonably infer that the type of <body> is different in the two cases. Of 
course, you could write two different schemas, each with different 
declarations:

        <element name="body" type="oldtype"/>
        <element name="body" type="newtype"/>

but you seem to want to keep your original schema document and just add a 
new one.  If your first document defines element as:

        <element name="body" type="oldtype"/>

then you're going to have to find some way of changing the definition of 
oldtype, and that's likely done in a second schema document using 
<xs:redefine>.   Probably something along the lines of:

        <!-- schema document #2>
        <xs:schema>
          <xs:redefine>
          <xsd:complexType name="oldtype"> 
            <xsd:complexContent>
              <xsd:extension base="xsd:all">
                <xsd:attribute name="customAttr" type="xsd:string"/> 
                <xsd:attribute name="another" type="xsd:string"/>
               </xsd:extension> 
            </xsd:complexContent>
          </xsd:complexType> 
          </xs:redefine>
        <xs:schema>


There are probably other ways to solve your problem, and almost surely 
other ways to use redefine in this case (perhaps redefining the type of 
the html element to one in which the element declaration of body gives it 
a different named type.  Anyway, my intuition is that redefine is on the 
list of possibilities for you to consider.  Redefine is controversial, 
because it's tricky in certain ways, and in part because implementations 
in early parsers were not all consistent with each other.  Still, it's an 
option to consider I think. 

Please note that I will mostly be away from email this week, but perhaps 
others on this list can help you either to refine this idea, or to come up 
with others.

Noah

--------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn 
IBM Corporation
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
1-617-693-4036
--------------------------------------








"Dhanji R. Prasanna" <dhanji@gmail.com>
Sent by: xmlschema-dev-request@w3.org
04/09/2007 01:38 AM
 
        To:     xmlschema-dev@w3.org
        cc:     (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        extending schema


Hello

I am not sure if this is the right list for this question. I apologize if 
it is not (please point me in the right direction!).

My question is about adding attributes to an xml document via an 
additional schema. For example I would like to add to this: 

<html   xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
        xml:lang="en" lang="en">

  <body>...etc.

...a custom schema that allows certain attributes to be defined on body, 
span and so forth. I imagined something like this:

<html   xmlns:my="http://mynamespaceextentions"
        xmlns=" http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
        xml:lang="en" lang="en"> 

  <body my:customAttr="..." my:another="..."> 


I was unable to do this successfully via type substitution (I want all 
elements to be extended):

    <xsd:complexType name="my-component"> 
        <xsd:complexContent>
            <xsd:extension base="xsd:all">
                <xsd:attribute name="customAttr" type="xsd:string"/> 
                <xsd:attribute name="another" type="xsd:string"/>
            </xsd:extension> 
        </xsd:complexContent>
    </xsd:complexType>

But obviously I am doing something wrong. Im sure it is the highlighted 
portion. Then again I am not sure if this can be achieved at all with type 
substitution. Is there any way that I can do this by extending ( i.e. 
importing) the xhtml schema directly into my schema perhaps?

Thanks in advance.

Dhanji.

Received on Monday, 16 April 2007 01:57:37 UTC