[xsd-users] RE: xsd bypasses customized types

[Boris Kolpackov]

Hi Ray,

Ray Lischner <rlischner at proteuseng.com> writes:

> One difficulty is that we have many schemas. Type A may be customized 
> in schema B, and type C is customized in schema D, so when compiling 
> schema E, which contains types that extend A and C, one must know 
> about all the customizations and pass appropriate command line 
> arguments to xsd. This puts quite a burden on the person writing 
> schema E.

Yes, that's unfortunately the case. The original idea was to have
truly separate compilation of schemas but the reality proved we
are fighting a loosing battle. For example, in XSD 3.3.0 there is a
new option that allows one to specify which types are polymorphic
to reduce the generated code size. If the base is in schema B and
derived is in schema D, then one has to specify that the base is
polymorphic while compiling schema D. There is no other way to
figure this out.

The recommended way to handle this is to create an options file
which contains the --custom-type options for a specific set of
schemas (i.e., a set of schemas corresponding to an XML vocabulary).
Then when compiling other schemas that use this set of schemas
one can add the options file to the XSD command line.

In this particular situation I don't see any good alternatives to 
using the custom type information to decide not to suppress the
c-tor. Always generating the c-tor is not an option since in
99.9% of cases it will result in unnecessary code bloat. Having
a special option to selectively generate the c-tor for certain
types seems to require an even greater amount of work from your
side.

Let me know if the custom type approach will be acceptable or
if you have any other ideas.

Boris