xsd:any Re: [ubl] Agenda for Atlantic UBL TC call 13 July 2005

["Stephen Green" <stephen_green@seventhproject.co.uk>]

>    Continue the discussion of ANY and the other requests from
>    BryanR, to wit:
>
>       (1) A reconsideration of our prohibition of XSD ANY, because
>       there are regional laws requiring the inclusion of specific
>       information, and we need an extensible content area to
>       handle this; (2) Restrictions on strings in UBL content to
>       ensure that the content consists of more than white space,
>       for example through length or minlength facets; (3)
>       Reconsideration of our prohibition of appinfo, because there
>       are many cases where one element is conditional on another;
>       this would give Scehamatron (for example) the data it needs
>       to do conditional/contextual validation.
>


I can't make the meeting but a few points:

1. I was wrong about the possibility of using the CEFACT ATG2 SBDH
    for adding data instead of having xsd:any in UBL documents

   a. SBDH allows only one document inclusion
   b. this is the wrong use of SBDH which is for routing information
         to control business document processing

    but creating one's own top level schema/element is a way to avoid
    needing xsd:any in the UBL document schemas, though perhaps not a
    satisfactory way for all situations

2. Interestingly the SBDH does use xsd:any which makes me think it
     must be allowed in the ATG2 NDR

3. Couldn't the NDR make an exception anyway (it might have to for
     the SBDH) and allow xsd:any for schemas specially for the purpose
     of including UBL documents along with other related documents?
     Even producing a special exceptional UBL schema with something like:

<xs:complexType name="StandardBusinessDocumentGroup">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:any namespace="##other" processContents="lax" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>

    would be a great help and would avoid the need for xsd:any, perhaps,
anywhere
    in the main UBL documents.

Apologies for belabouring this.

All the best

Steve