XML Schemas (XSD) and XML

[Sridhar Pentlavalli via OfficeKB.com]

Hi

I am a beginner in XML and XSD. I have an XML mycompany.xml file and I wrote some validations for my XML file in another file mycompany.xsd. How to validate my XML document against the Schema I have. Through net searching, I came to know that XSD and XML can be activated from VB programming. I have VB Editor from MS EXCEL. Is there a way (code) to include both XSD and XML files in the VB code and validate my XML against XSD. What are the other possible ways to do it?

Please Help....

Thanx in advance
Sridhar P

 

[Stephan Kassanke]

Dear Sridhar,

you do not have to use vb/vba for xml validation. Most xml editors offer
validation tools for dtd and/or xsd validation. If you want to rely on
vb/vba to validate your documents this article will get you started:

http://www.developerfusion.com/scripts/print.aspx?id=2386

cheers,
Stephan

 

[Sridhar Pentlavalli via OfficeKB.com]

Thank you Stephan...

You said Most XML editors offers validation tools.... Can you quote one method to solve the problem.... I have XML and XSD files in notepad. How to include XSD in to XML file and how to validate it ..... etc....

Thanks for the support...
Sridhar P

 

[Dr. Stephan Kassanke]

Thank you Stephan...

You said Most XML editors offers validation tools.... Can you quote one
method to solve the problem.... I have XML and XSD files in notepad. How
to include XSD in to XML file and how to validate it ..... etc....

Thanks for the support...
Sridhar P

Dear Sridhar,

notepad is not exactly what I would call an XML editor ;-) I referred to
editors such as

www.altova.com/XMLSpy

XMLspy is commercial and not cheap, though. An alternative is
http://xmlfox.com/download.htm which is freely available and (afaik) able to
validate against an xml schema.

Additionally there are free standalone tools available:

http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/

xmlstar is a command line tool which can validate xml documents with a
corresponding xsd.


cheers,
Ste

 

[Suzanne]

Dr. Kassanke,
I came across your post and wondered if you might be able to help me.

The vendor of our application package provided us with another code
release. They told us that the DTDs did not change, but we found differences
in one file, so we believe there are more.

Do you know of any program that would allow us to compare two DTD files and
show the differences? I have Excel 2003, but being new to XML, I'm not sure
if its XML features would be of any help.

Thank you for any suggestions.

 

[Dr. Stephan Kassanke]

Dr. Kassanke,
I came across your post and wondered if you might be able to help me.

The vendor of our application package provided us with another code
release. They told us that the DTDs did not change, but we found
differences
in one file, so we believe there are more.

Do you know of any program that would allow us to compare two DTD files
and
show the differences? I have Excel 2003, but being new to XML, I'm not
sure
if its XML features would be of any help.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Dear Suzanne,

if you feed "dtd diff" into google you will find a lot of links related to
this topic. The first one is, again from Altova (no, I am related to that
company). They offer a tool named diffdog which does exactly what you want,
at least for schemata. Altova has a free trial version. Another option is
XML Diff (http://apps.gotdotnet.com/xmltools/xmldiff/overview.html) which
can be download here:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/xml/patch/1.0/wxp/en-us/xmldiffpatch.exe.

in general any diff tool will show the differences between files, the ones
mentioned above take the particular structure of XML,, DTD files into
account and will provide "better" results in terms of interpretation.

cheers,
Stephan

 

[Suzanne]

Dr. Stephan,
Thanks for these suggestions. I have a set of data quality tools fro Evoke
Software. One is a product FTM (Fixed Target Mapping). It allows you to
import DDL and DTD schemas and create data maps via drag and drop.

There is a function that allows you to "synchronize" a new schema with an
existing schema. This worked to show me the differences, but reporting these
ended up being a manual process as I had to create a list in another document
typing the elements that had been dropped as well as the new ones that had
been added.

I have a baseline to work from with this process, so I will try the tools
you suggested and compare.

Thanks again!
Suzanne