| Author: Prasham Sabadra 02 Jul 2008 | Member Level: Silver | Rating:  Points: 0 |
http://www.15seconds.com/issue/031209.htm
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| Author: LOGESHWARAN 13 Feb 2009 | Member Level: Gold | Rating: Points: 6 |
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?
What Is a 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 (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
REGARDS
LOGESHWARAN.P
mailto: logesh_ajax@logeshwaran.co.cc
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