Re: Tools to Generate XSD from Sample Instances

My good advice: don't.

or at least, do not expect too much of it.
If you do, you will still need to do a lot of manual work afterwoods improving your schema.

For example, if some attributes are enumerated, how do you know that ? And if you do, how are you sure you have all possible values in your schema ?
How do you know whether the minOccurs for a child element should be 0 or 1 ?

Essentially, automated generation can only be a very first step.

I have seen cases where a believe that XML-Schemas can be generated automatically, without any afterwork, has led to disaster.
For example, the HL7-v3 messages are auto-generated from UML diagrams. At least as far as I know, they are not improved after that by someone who has knowledge of  XML-Schema. The result is that the whole stuff is overcomplicated, illogical and even bad XML.
I can advice anyone that wishes to generate XML-Schemas to first learn XML-Schema.

Personally, I prefer to make a good model first (not using UML) and then write the XML-Schema by hand.

Best,

Jozef Aerts
XML4Pharma

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Tsao, Scott 
    To: xmlschema-dev@w3.org 
    Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 3:06 AM
    Subject: Tools to Generate XSD from Sample Instances


    I am wondering if there are good tools that would enable (auto) generation of XML schema from multiple instances of sample XML document.
     
    It seems to me that one should be able to specify certain parameters for the resulting schema, e.g., the design pattern [1] to be followed.
     
    Any comments or suggestions?
     
    [1] http://developers.sun.com/jsenterprise/archive/nb_enterprise_pack/reference/techart/design_patterns.html
     
     
    Thanks,


    Scott Tsao 曹壽國
    Associate Technical Fellow 
    The Boeing Company