Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Schema Examples

As you might expect, there are several approaches for defining schemas for the XML representations of our X12 transaction sets. There is no single approach that is necessarily the “right” approach for everyone. For the XML representations of our flat files and CSV files I took the very easy route of letting a tool such as XMLPY generate the schemas for me. A more comprehensive approach might be to develop type library schemas, as discussed in Chapter 4, for the X12 Data Element Dictionary and Segment Directory. We could then develop instance document schemas for transaction sets that used data element and segment type definitions from the type libraries. An ambitious hacker (with enough cash to purchase the “table data” version ...