XML Hacks

Validate Multiple Documents Against an XML Schema at Once

A Xerces module allows you to validate more than one XML instance at a time against an XML Schema. This hack shows you how to use the Java class xni.XMLGrammarBuilder .

This book describes several online and command-line validators that let you check whether a document conforms to a W3C XML Schema definition. Some are faster than others, and some are more suitable for a particular platform. The special advantage of the Xerces Java xni.XMLGrammarBuilder sample application (which, being a Java program, runs on any platform) is its ability to validate multiple documents simultaneously. This sample application is packaged in the xercesSamples.jar file included with the Java Xerces distribution (http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/), which is part of the file archive that came with the book.

If you work with XML, you’ve probably received an email at work that says “here’s the data” and included a ZIP file full of XML files—or worse, a bunch of files all attached individually to the email. Before doing anything with those files, you probably want to validate them to check whether the email’s sender is passing along any problems to you. You could write a Perl script to generate a batch file that calls your favorite parser for each file, or you could enter the command to parse the first file, press your cursor-up key to retrieve that command, modify it, run it again, and repeat these steps multiple times. Or, you could use the xni.XMLGrammarBuilder ...