RE: Schema Newbie Boxed in a corner . . .

Generally, that's not a good way of designing your XML, which explains why
there is no way of describing your design in XML Schema. It's best to use
element and attribute names to denote types, and element or attribute values
to contain instance data.
 
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


  _____  

From: xmlschema-dev-request@w3.org [mailto:xmlschema-dev-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Frank Merrow
Sent: 25 April 2008 21:45
To: xmlschema-dev@w3.org
Subject: Schema Newbie Boxed in a corner . . .


So I am writing my first Schema and a little lost.

The heart of the existing file I am trying to write a schema for looks
something like this:

<AI00020000 type='faq'>223</AI00020000>
<AI00020001
type='wiki'>Debugging_Problems_with_APS_Closing_Log_Files</AI00020001>
<AI00020002
type='wiki'>Doing_Proper_Error_Recovery_for_RawRequestResponse</AI00020002>

So in effect the "element name" is a database key and the set of keys is
constantly expanding.

Based on my limited understanding of XSD, this cannot be done.

The problem here is that new "elements" are going to be showing up all the
time.

If the data had been structured like this:

<aitags id='AI00020000' type='faq'>223</aitags>

Then I think I could have made it work and then put a validation on "id" to
enforce "AI" followed by exactly 8 decimal digits.

However, that I can see, there is no way to declare a "set of elements whose
names all start with AI followed by 8 decimal digits".

My read of the schema docs suggest XSD just are not setup to do that.

Am I correct?  Or is there some way to describe this without having to add
something to the XSD file every time a new key is added to the XML file?

Frank