Yes I was thinking of this as the short form for setting default properties.

I really came up with this while trying to create very compact unit tests for the UofI Daffodil software. This is written in Scala (really the next programming language you should learn. Runs on JVM, fully integrates with Java, lots of other goodness.) Here's an example, I elipsed out the namespace properties.

def testInt42() {
  val data = bytesFromChars("\u0000\u0000\u0000\u002A")
  // nice: scala has built in XML support. No string quoting hell, just write the XML (hey, that rhymes :-)
  val testSchema = <xs:Schema ...namespace crud... dfdl:encoding="iso-8859-1" dfdl:byteOrder="bigEndian" ...>
                    <xs:element name="testElement" type="xs:int" dfdl:representation="binary" dfdl:lengthKind="implicit" />
                   </xs:Schema>
  val res = parser(testSchema).data(data).parse()
  val ans = (res \ "testElement")(0).text.asInt
  assertEquals(42, ans)
}

I think the same principles will apply to tutorial and expository materials about DFDL. I.e., I like being able to put default format properties directly on the xs:schema element!

This will really only be viable for very small examples where you only need a few properties. That said, those are useful for people learning the language, and trying it out via APIs.

But, I had never seen it before, and wasn't discussed, so I looked for it in the spec, and found nothing saying you can't do it. The language in the spec suggests it is allowed.

...mikeb

On Dec 4, 2011 7:55 PM, "Suman Kalia" <kalia@ca.ibm.com> wrote:
One way to view this annotation would be as if it is defined on the  default format at the xs:schema..   Question would be what if dfdl:format at xs:schema also has dfdl:encoding specified - which one would win ?..


Suman Kalia
IBM Canada Lab
WMB Toolkit Architect and Development Lead
Tel: 905-413-3923 T/L 313-3923
Email: kalia@ca.ibm.com

For info on Message broker
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/zones/businessintegration/wmb.html





From:        Mike Beckerle <mbeckerle.dfdl@gmail.com>
To:        dfdl-wg@ogf.org
Date:        12/02/2011 05:46 PM
Subject:        [DFDL-WG] short form on xs:schema?
Sent by:        dfdl-wg-bounces@ogf.org




I don't know that we ever talked about this.

Most schema constructs support short form

<xs:element ... dfdl:encoding="utf-8" />

Does the xs:schema itself support short form for the "default" format properties?

<xs:schema xmlns:xs="...."
    dfdl:encoding="utf-8">
...
</xs:schema>



--
Mike Beckerle | OGF DFDL WG Co-Chair 
Tel:  781-330-0412
--
 dfdl-wg mailing list
 dfdl-wg@ogf.org
 http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/dfdl-wg