I have a number of documents that have a lot of part numbers in them. Some of these part numbers are related to multiple documents. I would like to have one XML document that would pull in the needed part numbers for any other given XML document. My thoughts would be to create an ID attribute in the part_numb element. Then link using IDREF.
Example:
<part_numb id="123456">123456</part_numb>
<part_numb id="789101">789101</part_numb>
etc...

Would this be the best way of handling this type of situation or are there better solutions.

Thanks

Hi,

Do you need to restate the part number as both an attribute *and* as text?

I would have thought that either <part_numb>123456</part_numb> or <part_numb id="123456 /> would function equally well to reference the distinct parts. If you have other content to go within the part reference, you could have an ID attribute with nested tags.

<part_numb id="1234560">
<tag1>stuff</tag1>
<tag2>more stuff</tag2>
</part_numb>

Depends what's most relevant to your data.

I'm open to correction if I'm way off the mark there! Still banging my head against the padded cell of XML.