Those who deal with data transfer or document exchange within or across organizations with heterogeneous platforms will certainly accept and appreciate the need and power of XML. I am not going to delve into the merits of XML. I will, however, address a simple but powerful schema concept called XSD or XML Schema Definition.
- What is XSD Schema?
- What are the advantages of XSD Schema?
- What is important in XSD Schema?
A schema is a "Structure", and the actual document or data that is represented through the schema is called "Document Instance". Those who are familiar with relational databases can map a schema to a Table Structure and a Document Instance to a record in a Table. And those who are familiar with object-oriented technology can map a schema to a Class Definition and map a Document Instance to an Object Instance.
A structure of an XML document can be defined as follows:
- Document Type Definition (DTDs)
- XML Schema Definition (XSD)
- XML Data Reduced (XDR) -proprietary to Microsoft Technology
We are specifically going to work with XML Schema Definitions (XSD).
What Is XSD?
XSD provides the syntax and defines a way in which elements and attributes can be represented in a XML document. It also advocates that the given XML document should be of a specific format and specific data type.
XSD is fully recommended by W3C consortium as a standard for defining an XML Document. To know more about latest information on XSD, please refer the W3C site(http://www.w3.org/).
Advantages of XSD
So what is the benefit of this XSD Schema?
- XSD Schema is an XML document so there is no real need to learn any new syntax, unlike DTDs.
- XSD Schema supports Inheritance, where one schema can inherit from another schema. This is a great feature because it provides the opportunity for re-usability.
- XSD schema provides the ability to define own data type from the existing data type.
- XSD schema provides the ability to specify data types for both elements and attributes.
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