[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Extending type definitions using RelaxNG Compact

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Extending type definitions using RelaxNG Compact
• From: "Eric van der Vlist" <vdv@d...>
• Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 17:12:16 +0200 (CEST)
• In-reply-to: <0E6E2BCEEE1A154CA1FBDF39333BEE057CF63E@p...>
• References: <0E6E2BCEEE1A154CA1FBDF39333BEE057CF63E@p...>

Kristopher Brown said:

>  AlphaString = xsd:string {
>      pattern = "[a-zA-Z]*"
>  }
>
>  FirstName = AlphaString {
>      maxLength = "30"
>  }

> which would be equivalent to:
>
>  FirstName = xsd:string {
>      pattern = "[a-zA-Z]*"
>      maxLength = "30"
>  }
>
Kristopher,

As Jeni mentioned, you just can't do this straight away with Relax NG.

If you were using the XML syntax, you could rely on XML entities or
XInclude to give some modularity to your definitions,  though.
For instance you can define your "alphaStringPattern" as an entity:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE grammar[
<!ENTITY alphaStringPattern '<param name="pattern">[a-zA-Z]*</param>'>
]>
<grammar xmlns="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"
datatypeLibrary="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-datatypes">  <start>
    <element name="person">
      <element name="firstName">
        <ref name="firstNameType"/>
      </element>
      <element name="lastName">
        <ref name="lastNameType"/>
      </element>
    </element>
  </start>
  <define name="firstNameType">
    <data type="token">
      &alphaStringPattern;
      <param name="maxLength">30</param>
    </data>
  </define>
  <define name="lastNameType">
    <data type="token">
      &alphaStringPattern;
      <param name="maxLength">60</param>
    </data>
  </define>
</grammar>

This is not only saving a few keystrokes when using "&alphaStringPattern;"
but (more important IMO) giving more dodularity to your schema if you need
to modify the definition of this entity.
You would then be able to generate the corresponding schema in the compact
syntax straight away:
$ trang datatype.rng  datatype-back.rnc

would give:

start =
  element person {
    element firstName { firstNameType },
    element lastName { lastNameType }
  }
firstNameType = xsd:token { pattern = "[a-zA-Z]*" maxLength = "30" }
lastNameType = xsd:token { pattern = "[a-zA-Z]*" maxLength = "60" }

You should be able to do the same (and even more) using a macro
preprocessor on the compact syntax.
Hope this helps.

Eric

-- 
Freelance consulting and training.
                                            http://dyomedea.com/english/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Eric van der Vlist       http://xmlfr.org            http://dyomedea.com
(W3C) XML Schema ISBN:0-596-00252-1 http://oreilly.com/catalog/xmlschema
------------------------------------------------------------------------

• References:
  • Extending type definitions using RelaxNG Compact
    • From: "Kristopher Brown" <Kristopher.Brown@d...>

• Prev by Date: Re: Extending type definitions using RelaxNG Compact
• Next by Date: Re: Relax NG and Web Services (formerly Joining the church)
• Previous by thread: Re: Extending type definitions using RelaxNG Compact
• Next by thread: Re: Extending type definitions using RelaxNG Compact
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread