XSLT, 2nd Edition

Creating List Types

Another datatype we can create is a list type. A list type references a datatype; the new list type allows space-separated values of that type. We’ll add a new datatype called state-abbr to our schema, then create a list type based on it. Here’s the schema:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- list.xsd -->
<xs:schema 
  xmlns="http://www.oreilly.com/xslt"
  targetNamespace="http://www.oreilly.com/xslt"
  xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

  <xs:element name="person">
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element ref="name"/>
        <xs:element ref="birthday"/>
        <xs:element ref="age"/> 
        <xs:element ref="priorAddresses"/>
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>

  <xs:simpleType name="state-abbr-type">
    <xs:restriction base="xs:string">
      <xs:length value="2"/>
    </xs:restriction>
  </xs:simpleType>

  <xs:simpleType name="state-abbr-list-type">
    <xs:list itemType="state-abbr-type"/>
  </xs:simpleType>

  <xs:element name="name" type="xs:string"/>
  <xs:element name="birthday" type="xs:date"/>
  <xs:element name="age" type="xs:positiveInteger"/> 
  <xs:element name="priorAddresses">
    <xs:complexType>
      <xs:attribute name="states" type="state-abbr-list-type"/>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:element>

</xs:schema>

Now we have an attribute named states whose content is a list of one or more state abbreviations. Here’s a valid document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- list.xml --> <person xmlns="http://www.oreilly.com/xslt" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.oreilly.com/xslt ...