Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Schemas for File Description Documents

General Schema Design Considerations

I develop schemas for each of the file description documents and validate the documents against the schemas. Using schema validation enforces some predictability about the documents and makes writing the code to process them a bit easier.

As discussed in Chapter 4, several issues must be considered when designing schemas. We'll discuss schema design for application files in the next subsection and in more detail in Chapter 12, but here is a summary of some of the major design decisions regarding the schemas for the file description documents.

• Naming conventions: We've discussed most of them already, but I do want to note that I adhere to a convention of appending “Type” ...