Extensible Validation Report Language (XVRL)

A single finding, typically with an associated error code and/or message(s). A report element primarily contains detection elements. See Section 2.2, “Detection” for details.

A report may contain a digest element in order to provide a summary of the detection elements. For the distinct severity levels, counts of the detection elements for a given level may be specified on digest, for example in an @error-count attribute. In addition, the @worst attribute may give the highest severity level that occurs in the detection elements that are contained by the digest’s parent element.

A digest element may occur in addition to or instead of detection elements. If no detection element is included, a digest element must be included.

All information in digest is understood to be aggregated at some point from the actual detection elements. It is the responsibility of an XVRL creating/processing application to keep them up to date or to remove them when the underlying detection information is changed. A digest may be inserted either before or after the detection elements.

Information about the time of validation, the validator used, the document(s) under test, etc. See Section 2.3, “Metadata” for details.

A single metadata element need not contain all relevant metadata. Metadata infomation will be inherited from surrounding reports/metadata elements, that is, if a given metadata does not provide validator information but the parent reports/metadata does, the parent’s metadata/validator will also pertain to the current metadata element’s siblings and their descendants, unless overridden further down.

The result of a single validation method, typically using a single schema, typically applied to a single document (also referred to as the source document). The individual errors (or other findings) are included as detection elements.

A collection of report elements. It may contain the same metadata information as a single report in order to denote common information, for example if all validations have been applied to the same document or if all validations use the same schema or validation engine.

reports elements may nest in order to group report elements with common sets of metadata.

In order to filter or group messages for a formatted report, individual detections may be categorized according to arbitrary category systems, using the repeatable category element. Its optional attribute vocabulary can hold a string that designates the category system. There are no pre-defined values to choose from.

An error code. The term “error code” is used in a colloquial sense here. It need not relate to an error, but to any kind of message that has a distinctive identifying string.

The purpose of this element is to present a piece of content that surrounds the element that the detection pertains to. It contains an optional location element, followed by (optional) arbitrary text or non-XVRL element content.

Within a single detection element, the location in the source document that the validation error, warning, etc. pertains to is given by the location element’s attributes.

If not present, href is taken from the closest ancestor’s metadata/document/@href attribute. If there are multiple document/@href attributes in the closest ancestor’s metadata, the href attribute should not be omitted on location, or at least a disambiguating relative URI should be given in the location/@href attribute.

The attribute xpath contains an XPath expression that gives the location within the document. The in-scope value of the attribute xpath that is permitted on any element may give a namespace for the element names in this XPath expression. Apart from that, the Q{namespace-uri}local-name syntax should be used, but in-scope namespace prefixes or XPath predicates like [namespace-uri() = 'uri'] may also be used.

The attributes line and column may also be used to point at lines and columns in a textual representation of the source document.

The attribute octet-position may be used to give the byte position (1-offset) of the error. This may be useful for binary documents.

In order to support JSON document validations, the attributes jsonpath and jsonpointer may be used.

Giving multiple alternative pointers is not forbidden. However, it is beyond the scope of this specification to define mechanisms to enforce or check consistency between the attribute values. It is evident that jsonpointer or jsonpath are meaningless in the context of XML documents.

Other attributes are permitted if they are in a non-XVRL namespace.

An error message that pertains to a detection. There may be multiple message elements in a single detection element, typically to convey localized versions of essentially the same message. A message may contain arbitrary markup in non-XVRL namespaces. Messages are typically generated for consumption by humans.

In multi-step conversion pipelines it is sometimes required to save a common origin location that a portion of the validated document is derived from. This may be necessary in order to patch back error messages of later conversion stages into the source document.

The optional provenance element within a detection conveys exactly this information, in a contained location element that points to the provenance location in the original source document. A provenance element may contain multiple location elements; it is up to processing applications to discern between different roles that they may have.

Although it is possible to omit the @href attribute in the contained location elements, this URI is not inherited from a containing element’s metadata/document/@href attribute.

The severity attribute is permitted on a detection element. XVRL establishes a finite set of error levels that correspond to the impact of a detected issue. Each detection element may have a severity level, from highest (worst impact) to lowest, of “fatal-error”, “error”, “warning”, or “info”. In addition, the severity attribute may have the value “unspecified” which is equivalent to omitting the attribute.

An abstract of of a report, a reports collection, or an individual detection. This element is repeatable, for example, in order to support multiple natural languages. In the context of detection, it can serve as an abridged version of a full message that contains lengthy lists and the like.

This repeatable element may contain arbitrary textual or non-XVRL element content. It may appear in metadata and in detection. Its role attribute may be used to further classify the purpose of its content. Like any other XVRL element, it may be localized using the xml:lang attribute.

Purposes can be, but are not limited to, conveying the SVRL source that the XVRL report was created from, or a disclaimer, a confidentiality statement, or introductory content that should be included in a rendered report.

Information about the tool that created the source document. There is no content, only the optional attributes @name, @version, and @invocation. The @invocation attribute is meant to hold a command line that contains the invocation of the program that was responsible for generating the source document. This information can be useful for later diagnosing dependencies between errors and command line options.

See category

The URI of a source document may be specified in the href attribute. In addition or instead, the document may be given as the element content. See also location about inheritance of href.

The URI of a schema document may be specified in the href attribute. In addition or instead, the document may be given as the element content. The namespace of the schema may be given in the attribute schematypens. The version of the schema language may be given in the attribute version.

See summary element(s).

See supplemental element(s).

>The content needs to be an xsd:dateTime value, for example “2017-12-04T12:21:37.381+01:00”.

The title of a report, a reports collection, or an individual detection. This element is repeatable, for example, in order to support multiple natural languages.

Information about the validation program that generated the report(s) or the underlying messages (if XVRL was not generated natively by the program). There are optional attributes @name and @version, both are arbitrary strings. Arbitrary text or element (in a non-XVRL namespace) content may be contained, for example to describe a configuration or to include an actual configuration file.