Re: Why does XML Schema allow elements with complex type tobe

Another potential use case would be in healthcare - there's a difference between saying the patient has no allergies, and the patient has no known allergies.

HL7 CDA and FHIR express this difference in other ways though. CDA and FHIR use a particular attribute with a fixed set of values to correspond to the various cases (unknown, not asked, not applicable, ...). https://www.hl7.org/fhir/v3/NullFlavor/cs.html has the details.

Lauren

On Fri, Jul 12, 2019 at 6:40 AM Tomos Hillman <yamahito@g...> wrote:

On 12 Jul 2019, 11:24 +0100, Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>, wrote:

I don't think you should use nillible for the case of someone who has no middle name. That is simple optionality.

nillible is for a more esoteric purpose: where whether that person has a middle name or not has not been disclosed. This may because you don't know, the client didn't ask, or you dont want to tell. 

I think there's also the use case where a middle name was present (erroneously?) and has been removed, perhaps leaving a modification time stamp attribute.

Pretty horrible way to do it, IMO, but there you go

Thanks,

Tom