Currently dfdl:initiatedContent is used purely as a check that all the content of a sequence or choice have an initiator specified.

initiatedContent

Booloean

When 'true' indicates that all the children of the choice are initiated. It is a schema definition error if any children have their dfdl:initiator property set to the empty string.

When 'false', the children of the choice may have their dfdl:initiator property set to the empty string.

Annotation: dfdl:sequence, dfdl:choice, dfdl:group

It would help implementations decide more quickly if optional complex elements are present, and therefore have to save state less often, if initiatedContent was also made discriminating. I would expect that in most uses cases the initiator is the discriminator so this change would make that simpler to specify. The same effect can be achieved by adding a dfdl:discriminator to each element but that is having to specify the same intent twice.

If the initiator is not the discriminator then initiatedContent can be set to 'false'. You lose the schema checking but this is a less common case.

What do you think?

Alan Powell

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