Hi Mike I will confess to having not given a great deal of thought to multi-dim arrays in the past, but what you propose looks to be sound. Regards, Steve Steve Hanson WebSphere Business Integration Brokers, IBM Hursley, England Internet: smh@uk.ibm.com Phone (+44)/(0) 1962-815848 mike.beckerle@asc entialsoftware.co m To Sent by: dfdl-wg@gridforum.org owner-dfdl-wg@ggf cc .org Subject [dfdl-wg] How to handle 18/02/2005 21:21 multi-dimensional arrays We have come up with an approach to how to represent multi-dimensional arrays within XSD-described XML. The attached test file (.xml) and DFDL Schema (.dfdl.xsd) illustrate the proposed solution. The proposal does not require any changes to XSD, XML or any other special constructs outside of a single dfdl annotation to specify the storage order of the representation. I'm pretty happy with how this works out. We can handle arrays with different storage orders, like fortran style column-major vs. more common row-major, and it dovetails nicely with XPath expressions and the XSD data model. Schema validation can really do something for you, like tell you if you have all the elements of the array (if it's fixed size), and that you don't have multiple elements occupying the same array location. Those interested in multi-dimensional array support please give this some consideration. That said, I'm departing on vacation for a week, so I'll toss this out there for people to look at, but I won't be able to interact with you all on it until I get back. ...mikeb [attachment "test2dArray.xml" deleted by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM] [attachment "test2dArray.dfdl.xsd" deleted by Steve Hanson/UK/IBM]