Validating Input XML

ssbsts · January 5th, 2011, 11:56 AM

I am trying to do a simple validation on input xml that ant will take and use xsl to transform. Basically I want to be able to do a check to see if the input xml is empty or not and if it is an empty file which can happen every now and then have it moved to an error directory.

I was hoping that this could be achieved purely using ant and maybe the exec task, but it is seeming more likely that I will need to write a shell script to accomplish my task and then just call it from ant.

Any hope that I can get this done without writing a separate script?

Thanks

Martin Honnen · January 5th, 2011, 12:01 PM

An XML document is never empty, it has at least one element, the root element. That is a well-formedness requirement so you do not even need a schema respectively a validating parser to check that.
I don't see how ant, an exec task or a shell script relates to XSLT, the topic of this forum.

ssbsts · January 5th, 2011, 12:51 PM

is it empty if there is nothing in it? thanks for the response, it was very helpful.

Martin Honnen · January 5th, 2011, 12:56 PM

If there is really no markup at all in your input file then it is not a well-formed XML document and any XML parser will complain that there is no root element. There needs to be at least one element, the root element for your input file to be successfully parsed as XML and to be passed on to the XSLT processor.

ssbsts · January 5th, 2011, 12:59 PM

yes, i understand this concept. i am trying to implement a check because periodically empty "xml" files are supplied as input to ant and the transformation fails because of this. i would like to prevent these errors by implementing a check before-hand.

mods, go ahead and move or delete this or whatever you please.