Setting Policy - XML

You can tell the validator to ensure that every element in the XML document instance is qualified with a namespace via the "elementFormDefault" attribute of the <xsd:schema> element.

<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
targetNamespace="http://www.somedomain.com/ns/sw/"
xmlns:sw="http://www.somedomain.com/ns/sw/"
elementFormDefault="qualified">
<!-- 
snip --->
</xsd:schema>

This "elementFormDefault" attribute tells the validator that every element in the document instance must be qualified with a namespace identifier in order for the document to be valid. In order to verify this, you can try removing the namespace prefix from one of the <character> elements in the document instance above and validating the XML data - your validator should throw up a bunch of error messages about improperly-qualified elements.

Document authors can also satisfy this qualification requirement by specifying a default namespace for all the elements in the document instance - as in the following code segment.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<gallery xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns="http://www.somedomain.com/ns/sw/"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.somedomain.com/ns/sw/starwars.xsd">
<character>
<name>Luke 
Skywalker</name>
<species>Human</species>
<language>Basic</language>
<home>Tatooine</home>
</character>
<character>
<name>Chewbacca</name>
<species>Wookie</species>
<language>Shyriiwook</language>
<home>Kashyyyk</home>
</character>
<character>
<name>Chief 
Chirpa</name>
<species>Ewok</species>
<language>Ewok</language>
<home>Endor</home>
</character>
</gallery>

If you don't necessarily want to force the document author to prefix the namespace identifier to every element in each document instance, you can turn off this requirement by specifying a value of "unqualified" for the "elementFormDefault" attribute.

>>> More XML Articles          >>> More By Harish Kamath, (c) Melonfire

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