Different XSD for Create vs Update operations - xsd

consider the following object:
<Person>
<Name/>
<FirstName/>
<Street/>
<City/>
<SocialSecurityNr/>
<Gender/>
<Hobby/>
</Person>
Asume I use this object for a Create web service operation. When calling the Create operation, all fields of the Person object must be provided except 'hobby'
Now assume that I also have an Update operation. When updating, only socialsecuritynumber is mandatory: I do not need to update each field.
How do you process this in an XSD? Should you define seperate XSDs for the create and update operation?
The reason I want to make this distinction is that I do not want to send unnecessary fields from sender to recipient when it is not needed. Hence, I want to use minOccurs = 0 as much as possible.
It feels like this is a common problem, but can't find any references about it

It's really up to you. I've seen both approaches.
If I want a comprehensive description of the service contract, I would go with separate operations and just use common data types, defined in the xsd whenever needed.
The other option is to not use minOccurs=0. This will make the xsd shorter and somewhat more flexible, but also more open to interpretation (which, when describing a service more bad than good). If you need to give the wsdl to someone in order to consume your service in the future this will require more description of the different use cases (create/update) in the documentation. The other approach is more straightforward and intuitive for developers.

I always use a common structure for create and update.
When a data carrying element is declared in an XSD it should have the attrivute nilable set to true e.g.:
<xsd:element name="Result" type="xsd:string" nillable="true"/>
This allows for the xsi:nil attribute to be applied to the element.
[1]
<tag>Data</tag>
<tag xsi:nil=”false”>Data</tag>
<tag xsi:nil=””>Data</tag>
Tag is present and includes data. There may be an empty xsi:nil attribute or the attribute may not be present.
The target application needs to update the field with the specified data.
[2]
<tag></tag>
<tag xsi:nil=””></tag>
<tag xsi:nil=”false”></tag>
<tag/>
<tag xsi:nil=""/>
Tag is present and is self closing or does not include data. There may be an empty xsi:nil attribute or the attribute may not be present.
The target application needs to update the field to zero length data. E.g. an empty string.
Some applications may update the data to null.*
[3]
<tag xsi:nil=”true”>Data</tag>
<tag xsi:nil=”true”></tag>
<tag xsi:nil=”true”/>
Tag has the xsi:nil attribute set to true. It may or may not contain data and it may or may not be self closing.
The corresponding field should be updated to null.
[4]
Tag is missing from the xml.
No update should occur on the corresponding field

Related

Require that an element has another element as a descendant

Is there a way in an xsd schema to require that an element have another element somewhere as a descendant?
For example, element parent requires a descendant desc. This is valid:
<parent>
<a>
<b>
<desc></desc>
</b>
</a>
</parent>
As is this:
<parent>
<c>
<desc></desc>
</c>
</parent>
but this isn't:
<a>
<parent>
<b/>
</parent>
</a>
The potential child elements for parent are many and complicates, so it would be difficult to enumerate every possible valid configuration.
Something like the key/selector schema elements seems like it would work, where I could provide an xpath expression defining the valid locations for desc element, but all of the examples I've found are aimed at matching up the value of attributes.
No, (almost) all XML Schema validation is shallow, called "local" in the spec. Here's one excerpt that emphasizes type validation as "local" validation.
Element Validated by Type If an
element information item is ·valid·
with respect to a ·type definition· as
per Element Locally Valid (Type)
(§3.3.4), [it is marked as] ·validated·.
The only exception is for the identity constraints like uniqueness and key-references which have a broad scope in an XML document but narrow uses.
I don't know if XSD supports what you are trying to do, but there is a work-around.
You could do complex validations with a two-step process:
First simply use your XSD schema for basic validation
Next use an XSLT which does more complex validations, and outputs the result of that validation
This may not plug in well to whatever framework you are working with, but might work well for (partially) custom code. It also has the advantage (over doing the extra validations in code) that you can publish both documents.
From a quick google search, one effort towards this end is Schematron. It actually foregos XSD entirely, and just uses XSLT. It appears to be a published standard:
http://www.schematron.com/

An XSD attribute to capture "source data field"

I have a domain model which is intended to generalise several source systems. As such, in certain cases the decision was made to overload data into new a generic field rather than to create several specific fields.
To account for this, when the source systems data is mapped onto the new domain model, I was hoping to record the source fieldname as an attribute, e.g.:
<Event>
<Description sourceField="subject">...</Description>
<Description sourceField="description">...</Description>
<Description sourceField="issue">...</Description>
<...>
</Event>
What would be the appropriate way to add such an attribute into the XSD? Would I need to specifically attach it to every such overloaded field, or is there a general way to allow an attribute across all elements?
Please don't point out that I should just add the extra fields into the domain model if I need to distinguish between the different data - the decision has been made, I just need to work around it!
Thanks in advance.
Not really.
If all your element declarations extend from a common base type definition, then you can add the attribute to the base.
If all your element declarations include an anyAttribute, you can make a global attribute definition for sourceField. Then the validator would at least allow your attribute but not require it. And if the anyAttribute is strict or lax the validator will make sure the attribute's content is valid.

XML Schema: How to validate an attribute with multiple keys concatenated?

Let's say I can get XML like this:
<Property Name="Title"/>
<Property Name="Content"/>
<Property Name="Address"/>
<Source properties="Title,Content,Address"/>
How coud I validate the "properties" attribute of "Source", so that any composition of the above listed "Property" items could be checked? (For example: "Title", "Title,Content", all of these concatenations are correct, while "Title, URL" is not correct.)
You can't do that within XML Schema. You can do it with your own higher level of validation based on XSLT, XQuery or Schematron, for example.
xan is right; validating always means, to match a XML file against a given schema. But there is no schema involved here, your problem is instead, to read a data file, and validate later entries against earlier ones (if the box above is supposed to represent one file) or one data file against another data file (if the gap is supposed to be a file separator). Beyond that, a schema defines the structure of elements and attributes and optionally data types (values only, if there is a strict enumeration of valid values). Also no match here, instead you want to verify data against data. Sorry, the tool of a schema mismatches the problem to solve.

referential integrity in XML files without globally unique IDs

Maybe I'm not seeing the forest for the trees, but here it goes:
I'm "designing" an XML document and have so far come up with something like the following:
<element key="root">
<data>...</data>
<elements>
<element key="foo">
<data>...</data>
</element>
<element key="bar">
<data>...</data>
</element>
</elements>
</element>
So it's a simple hierarchical structure. What I want to do now is have references from one element to any other element anywhere in the hierarchy. That would be trivial if each element had a unique ID, but they don't. So far I only plan on guaranteeing that each element's key is unique within its level (much like file names in a directory structure).
In other words, if I had fully qualified keys such as root.foo, guaranteeing referential integrity would be simple. But then I'd be storing redundant information (I already know that foo is a sub element of root, why store that information twice?).
I realize that this is essentially a cosmetic problem. One of the simplest solutions is probably to just auto-assign IDs and be done with it. But this is fairly inelegant (and error-prone unless you have a nice front end for editing the file), so I was hoping for a nicer way to do it.
Is there a way to implement this in XML Schema?
Use <xs:key> and <xs:keyref>
Keys are unique within specified context so they don't need to be globally unique like ID:s <xs:key> contains <xs:selector> element that specify the scope or context of the key (key value/s must be unique across this set) and <xs:field> element that defines the key nodes. A key can have multiple fields in which case their combination must be unique. <xs:key> and <xs:keyref> are used within an <xs:element> declaration.

Can you use key/keyref instead of restriction/enumeration in XML schema?

Suppose we have a stylesheet which pulls in metadata using the key() function. In other words we have instance documents like this:
<items>
<item type="some_type"/>
<item type="another_type"/>
</items>
and a table of additional data we would like to associate with items during processing:
<item-meta>
<item type="some_type" meta="foo"/>
<item type="another_type" meta="bar"/>
<item type="yet_another_type" meta="baz"/>
</item-meta>
Finally, suppose we want to do schema validation on the instance document, restricting the type attributes to the set of types which occur in item-meta. So in the schema we want to use key/keyref instead of restriction/enumeration. This is because using restriction/enumeration will require making a separate list of valid type attributes.
However, it doesn't look like key/keyref will actually work. Having tried it (with MSXML 6.0) it appears the selector of a schema key won't accept the document() function in its xpath argument, so we can't examine the item-meta data, whether it appears in an external file or in the schema file itself. It looks like the only place we can look for keys is the instance document.
So if we really don't want to have a separate list of valid types, we have to do a pre-validation transform, pulling in the item-meta stuff, then do the validation, then do our original transform. That seems overcomplicated for what ought to be a relatively straightforward use of XML schema and stylesheets.
Is there a better way?
Selectors in key/keyref allow only a very restricted xpath syntax. Short, but not completely accurate: The selector must point to a subnode of the element declared.
The full definition of the restricted syntax is -> here.
So, no I don't see a better way, sorry.
BTW: The W3C states that this restriction was made to make life easier on implementers of XML Schema processors. Keep in mind that one of the design goals of XML Schema was to make it possible to process a document in streaming mode. That explains really a lot of the sometimes seemingly random restrictions of XML Schema.
Having thought about it a little more, I came up with the idea of having the stylesheet do that part of the validation. The schema would define the item type as a plain string, and the stylesheet would emit a message and stop processing if it couldn't look up the item type in the item-meta table.
This solution fixes the original problem of having to write down the list of valid types more than once, but it introduces the problem that validation logic is now mixed in with the stylesheet logic. I don't have enough experience with XSD+XSLT to tell whether this new problem is less serious than the old one, but it seems to be more elegant than what I wrote earlier about pulling the item-meta table into each instance document in a pre-validation transform.
You wouldn't need to stop the XSLT with some error. Just let it produce something that the schema won't validate and that points to the original problem like
<error txt="Invalid-Item-Type 'invalid_type'"/>
Apart from that please keep in mind that there are no discussion threads here. The posts may go up and down, so it's better to edit your question accordingly.
Remember, the philosophy here is "One question, and the best answer wins".

Resources