It's completely true that Microsoft Office has ways of associating XML content with XML Schemas. Unfortunately XML Schemas are not the best language for describing document formats. One of the typical MS marketing things is that this will not require any programming just have your schema and your markup and you have to do nothing, which is laughable (hey you should at least do some work in design mode). But I suppose people find that out sooner or later.
Open Office has no good equivalent. It supports a subset of the Xforms functionality, but not enough to be useful for significantly complex XML formats. Furthermore the Xforms implementation has a performance problem when getting over a few hundren bindings. I don't know that this project is getting the support it needs to fix these problems. If it did then it would be simple enough to produce an XML Schema to XForms transform that provided the inherent functionality of Infopath type stuff in MS (I believe), I have already produced a generic any (non-mixed content) to OO Xforms implementation, that also tried to provide for some of the missing functionality in the OO implementation (such as lack of XForms repeat.) Cheers, Bryan Rasmussen On 9/8/07, Kay Hayen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hello, > > this is a post originally made to the users list, but it went under in the > noise and likely is more appropiate here: > > please consider the following situation: > > We have an XML schema defined and files according to that schema. In MS Office > 2003 it's possible to associate a document with this schema of our own making > and open/edit these. > > It's possible to add tags and content and have Word verify and show the > document structure and validity on the fly. > > When the document is saved, the resulting XML contains the XML tags from our > schema, just put into a namespace. In fact, the Word XML file refers to our > schema. The both schemas of Word and our schema can be seen as overlayed. > It's very easy to extract the XML data document from that, and Office seems > to allow to make "data only" saves of the XML. > > Even better: In the XML SDK for Office there is a tool that accepts a Word > file as input, and creates a transformation from our XML data files into Word > XML documents well formatted and attaching corporate identity and stuff, > which would allow to automate things with xsltproc. > > The question I have now. Can the same be done with ODF? My research in the XML > project documentation showed that it would not. And also that Writer would > not even allow such tags in a different namespace to persist a open/save > cycle. Is that a shortcoming of ODF or an implementation detail? > > And I think I saw that OOo would not have a validating XML parser, which would > be a pre-requisite. > > As we are planning to use this work flow, I want an idea, if there any chance > or plan that oowriter could be used in the same way. > > Best regards, > Kay Hayen > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
