On Friday's call Mike & Suman were tasked with creating a proposal for the number of array specific properties that we expose in 1.0. Spec v028 lists a core set: occursKind occurs occursSeparator occursStopvalue occursStopValueKind The debate was whether array properties are needed for handling prefix/suffix region, the motivating example being leading skip count. Here's a format I came across recently, JSON, meaning JavaScriptObjectModel (http://json.org/), used in conjunction with REST style web services. For a model that logically looks like... String name; String[] address; String zip; ...an example JSON instance could look like... {"name":"Steve Hanson", "address":["1 Woodlands","Awbridge","Romsey"], "zip":"SO51 0GP" } ... and a DFDL model (ignoring white space) would look like. <xs:sequence dfdl:separator="," dfdl:initiator="{" dfdl:terminator="}" dfdl:lengthKind="implicit"> <xs:element name="name" type="xs:string" dfdl:initiator=""name":" dfdl:terminator="" dfdl:lengthKind="delimited"/> <xs:sequence dfdl:separator="" dfdl:initiator=""address":[" dfdl:terminator="]" dfdl:lengthKind="implicit"> <xs:element name="address" type="xs:string" dfdl:initiator="" dfdl:terminator="" dfdl:lengthKind="delimited" maxOccurs="unbounded" dfdl:occursKind="implicit" dfdl:occursSeparator=","/> </xs:sequence> <xs:element name="zip" type="xs:string" dfdl:initiator=""name":" dfdl:terminator=""/> </xs:sequence> Note the need to wrap the address element in a sequence to consume the array markup **. I could have used a complex element, but that would have added an extra infoset level and I wanted to conform as closely as possible to the logical view of the data above. To do this with explicit array properties the DFDL model would look like: <xs:element name="address" type="xs:string" dfdl:initiator="" dfdl:terminator="" dfdl:lengthKind="delimited" maxOccurs="unbounded" dfdl:occursKind="implicit" dfdl:occursSeparator="," dfdl:occursInitiator=""address":[" dfdl:occursTerminator="]" /> Note the need for dfdl:occursInitiator, dfdl:occursTerminator. Personally, I don't think the extra properties increase the useability by much. ** The one thing that feels a bit odd is having dfdl:lengthKind="implicit" on the wrapping xs:sequence. I feel like I want to use dfdl:lengthKind="delimited", because the sequence is followed by the separator of the outer sequence. And in this instance I could, as there are no 'final unused' bytes in the data. I'm still getting used to length on sequences, I guess. Regards, Steve Steve Hanson WebSphere Message Brokers Hursley, UK Internet: smh@uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 Unless stated otherwise above: IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 741598. Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU