Generating XML schemas

Hi,

I don’t know whether this is of any interest to anybody but for various reasons a third party was unable to provide schemas for their XML messages so I had to generate them myself using an XML editor and sample XML.

I have been using Liquid XML Studio for a year or so and it has managed to do everything I’ve thrown at it up to now. Even though I could generate a schema that would validate the XML it would not compile in Cloverleaf 5.6.

I then looked at Visual Studios XML tools and got the same problem – possibly because they both use MS XML library – I don’t know for sure.

Anyway, I Googled and found a number of other editors so I downloaded the Oxygen XML editor – I found the user interface and menu options quite confusing but I eventually got a schema and again it would not compile in Cloverleaf.

My next option was Altova XML Spy – This was quite easy to use and generated my schema – It also compiled in Cloverleaf.

I still had to edit the schema generated by XML Spy to work with all my variations on the XML message but it was the only editor of the 4 I tried to would compile first time with Cloverleaf.

I suspect that this part in due to XML Spy been a Java based application and uses Xerces like Cloverleaf does as it’s XML parser but Oxygen is also a Java app and this failed.

I hope this helps others who may be struggling with XML and shows that sometimes you have may to have several tools available to do the same task.

Garry