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At 2004-05-25 11:44 -0400, Noah Genner wrote:
> I need to be able to check an XML document for some specific elements,
> and if
>possible produce a little report on which ones are missing. The document has
>already been validated against a dtd/schema that contains approximately 270
>elements, but I need to check that the ~40 I need are present. If they aren't
>present I want to produce a little report that says which elements are not
>present.
> Can I do this with XSLT, or is there an easier way to do this?
You could do it with XSLT or with Schematron as both of these check
business rules.
But since what you are doing is more like a grammatical check with your own
constraints, than a business rule check with algorithmic properties, I
would lean towards you writing your own grammar and just checking your
instance against both the "official" grammar in the DTD/Schema and then
against your "additional constraints" grammar. My personal choice is using
ISO/IEC 19757-2 RELAX-NG for writing your own "mini-grammar".
In fact, you could even relax the content constraints on your mini-grammar
if you wanted to use it to supplement the "official" grammar: just use the
mini-grammar to check for the presence of elements and attributes as being
simple text values, letting the "official" grammar check the elements and
attributes for being particular data types.
I'm not sure which would be more "politically correct" so I'm curious what
others on this list would feel about the difference between these two
approaches: consider that I have a W3C Schema expression with many derived
and explicit data types with value constraints up the wazoo, but I want to
check that only a subset of those constraints have been met (that subset
containing at the least all of the mandatory constructs):
(1) - write a replacement ISO/IEC 19757-2 RELAX-NG schema mimicking all of
the W3C data types for all of the value constraints, thereby negating the
need for the W3C Schema expression for any purpose
or
(2) - write a supplemental ISO/IEC 19757-2 RELAX-NG schema using only text
value constraints, thereby requiring "primary validation" by the official
W3C Schema expression and checking only "business requirement presence
constraints" with the RELAX-NG schema
Personally I would lean to (2) so as to not "compete" with the W3C Schema
expression or need to play catch-up with any changes to the W3C Schema
expression.
What would others do when needing to validate a subset of a published W3C
Schema expression maintained by a third party?
........................... Ken
--
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