I am looking into an issue where we have a generic XML schema for a particular XML-EDI transaction.
In order to make this schema modular and maintainable we want to make many smaller XML schemas which will then be referred in the generic XML schema.

Then based on our clients requirements for this transaction, we would want to create a subset of this generic schema, so that the client specific schema is only specific to client XML document.

We would want to use XSLT to do that transformation.

My question here is would the generic XML schema import all the smaller schemas, so that resultant schema obtained has all the necessary schema elements as specified in stylesheet?


thanks

If I understand correctly, you want to include other schemas in your generic Schema through XSLT. You can use xs:include within your clients schema (http://www.w3schools.com/schema/el_include.asp) to include the Generic Schemas

That would be one way to do it.

Maybe I didn't explain my issue properly.

What I was thinking about was to have a generic schema(for a particular transaction) which referred to a number of smaller schemas.That is the generic schema kind of imports or includes the smaller schemas.

Now we have clients who would be interested in sending XML documents using only a part or a subset of the generic schema.

So what our plan is to to transform the generic schema using a style sheet(having rules specific to that client) to get a schema which is subset of generic schema.

This way we still retain generic schema(and all the smaller schemas which are included in the generic schema) and can create different schemas depending on clients requirement from the generic schema.

Would this be a good way to do it?

Thanks
Pankaj

"What I was thinking about was to have a generic schema(for a particular transaction) which referred to a number of smaller schemas.That is the generic schema kind of imports or includes the smaller schemas."

This would require your generic schema not to be generic anymore. However you can have your client schema's refer to your generic schema.

Yes I agree the generic schema won't be generic schema anymore as it would be a list of includes.

But i guess my question here is can this schema(having a list of includes in it) be transformed using XSLT to create a static XML schema?

thanks

I dont think you can use XSLT to transform an xsd into an xsd. A Schema is used to validate an XML file, an XSLT is used to transform an XML file to OUTPUT

I'd be a bit reluctant to say unreservedly that this is a good idea. Firstly, I'm reluctant to endorse a design without more information on the requirements - and that makes it a consultancy exercise.

In principle yes, doing transformations on schemas can be a useful technique. But schemas are complex and there are all sorts of possible complications; I'm a little bit concerned that if you knew quite what you were taking on, you wouldn't be posting to this forum.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

Michael,
Thanks for your advice.
It should definitely help us.

Michael,
Why I was talking of this design was to know if it was a common practice to do transformations of schemas as schemas are XML documents themselves.

Thanks everyone for their advice.