Pollo: supported schema languages

Pollo supports schema languages to help you edit your documents.

For those who don't know what a schema language is: a schema languages defines the allowed structure of an XML document. It does this by specifying the set of valid element names, their attributes, and the content allowed in the elements. A document can then be validated against the schema, to check if the document conforms to the structure described in the schema.

History

Pollo needed a schema language that supports namespaces. Yet that schema language should be very simple, so that it could  be implemented in a matter of hours. Or there should be a library available to quickly embed support for that schema language in Pollo. XML DTD's, although relatively simple, don't support namespaces. So I decided to invent my own little schema language.

Pollo's schema language

• a list of child elements (this is just an enumeration, not a real content model).
  

• the attributes that can appear on the element

• for those attributes, an enumeration of possible attribute values can be defined, either as a fixed list, or dynamically composed  by evaluating an XPath expression on the document you're editing

The above features are thought out to be usefull for editing documents, and not for validating a document against it.

Here's a small extract from the Cocoon Sitemap schema as an example:

<schema xmlns:map="http://apache.org/cocoon/sitemap/1.0">
    <element name="map:generate">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="type" readvaluesfrom="/map:sitemap/map:components/map:generators/map:generator/@name"/>
            <attribute name="src"/>
            <attribute name="label"/>
        </attributes>
        <allowedsubelements names="map:parameter"/>
    </element>
    <element name="map:action-set/map:act">
        <attributes>
            <attribute name="type" readvaluesfrom="/map:sitemap/map:components/map:actions/map:action/@name"/>
            <attribute name="src"/>
            <attribute name="action"/>
        </attributes>
        <allowedsubelements names=""/>
    </element>
    [...]
</schema>

Notice that the second element definition only applies to map:act elements occuring as child of map:action-set

The syntax of Pollo's schema language may be a bit ugly, but that's because it was created (and implemented) in just a couple of hours. If someone wants to improve it, feel free.

It is not possible to validate a document against a Pollo schema, Pollo schemas can only be used to guide editing.

Other schema languages (XML Schema, Relax NG, DTD, ...)

Pollo supports a range of schema languages through the "Multi Schema Validator" library from Sun. More precisely the following languages should work: XML Schema, DTD, Relax NG, Relax Core, Relax ns and Trex.

These schema languages can be used in Pollo both to guide you while editing (i.e. to show the available elements and attributes), and to validate your document against it.

One important thing about schema languages like XML Schema and Relax NG is that they allow you to reuse the same element name in different places On each place the element name is used, it is possible to specify different attributes and a different content model. While this is a powerfull feature, it makes things a lot harder for XML editors. After all, the editor cannot determine from the element name alone what attributes it can have, but it should look in what context the element occurs. But while you're editing a document, the document may be in an invalid state making it impossible to determine the right type of the element. Pollo works around this by looking only at the element name, and by showing all elements that can be inserted and showing all attributes that can occur on the element with that name, regardless of the context in which the element is used.

If you want to see precisely what can occur inside the element, or what attributes it can have, select that element, and then choose 'Schema | Show Content Model' in the menubar. This will validate the document up to the selected element, and then asks the validator what content it expects there, which is then displayed. (This is an experimental feature).

To validate your document against the schema, choose 'Schema | Validate document' in the menubar. If the document is valid, a message box will be displayed to let you know it is. If any validation errors occured, a panel will be displayed to show them. By double clicking on an item in the validation error list, you will jump to the location in the document where that error was detected.

About DTD's

Pollo will not automatically use the DTD declared using DOCTYPE in your document.

Pollo does however support using DTD's through MSV, just select them in the 'View Type' dialog you get after opening a file. There's one important limitation though: you cannot use DTD's if you use namespaces.

Further possibilities

Alternative implementations

Chaining schemas

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