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Rank: Newbie
Joined: 4/27/2011
Posts: 1
Location: Puget Sound, WA
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Just some feedback to the developers, but the UI and functionality are far from good. It takes too much expertise with the product to do the most simple things. Sort of like Visual Studio... forget being productive during the first weeks of having the tool.
Trying to work with it to create an XML schema from a sample XML file and then tune that schema to be usefull (ie get rid of all of the types and definitions it creates that should not be there)... and I've decided that I can do this much more effectively with a basic text editor that uses global search and replace, than with a tool like XMLspy.
Maybe the functionality is in there, but the graphical and UI elements don't work the way I am expecting them to. Renaming things from the generated types (AT_1, ... ) to a meaningful name is painful, as changes don't seem to be made globally to keep things in sync, and for some reason it insists on creating a schema in 3 files, rather than one file... and I cannot control that behavior.
It would help if when your cursor is on a field, and you hit F1, the help specific to that item would come up rather than the root fo the help file.
Hopefully Altova has some usability engineers working on this product. Preferably ones that are not and never have been on the development team nor used the product in the past.
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Rank: Newbie
Joined: 10/28/2002
Posts: 1,283
Location: AT
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Hi,
thank you for your comments however it must be pointed out that there ARE reasons for certain behaviour, and of course it will require some time before you have optimized how you work with XML Spy until you are more acustomed to the way it works. Complex software that has taken over 10 years to develop cannot be learned in one day..
One example: you wrote:
"for some reason it insists on creating a schema in 3 files, rather than one file"
There IS a reason for this. If you use a sample xml file that contains elements from different namespaces to auto generate an xsd then there is NO other way around this. In this case multiple schemas MUST be created, because you will require one schema for each namespace. How else do you envision doing this if it is only possible to have a maximum of one targetnamespace per physical schema file? If only one schema file would be generated for such xml files then it would be invalid, plain and simple.
If a sample xml file does not contain several namespace references then only one schema will be generated.
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Rank: Advanced Member
Joined: 12/13/2005
Posts: 2,856
Location: Mauritius
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>Renaming things from the generated types (AT_1, ... ) to a meaningful name is painful, as changes don't seem to be made globally to keep things in sync
Instead of guessing what you intend to do, XMLSpy has both functionalities. If you meant to rename globally - just use the "Rename with all references" command from the context menu.
But if you meant to rename the complex type in order, for example, to derive a new one with original name from it, then just renaming is exactly what you need.
And you've overseen even more. If you say global replace is what you actually meant, why didn't you just hit the Replace button?
And on the very end, if you feel uncomfortable with the graphical representation of XML Schema, why not switch to the Text View and do changes there - even for such hard core text-lovers there is at least a validation support from XMLSpy, which you won't find in vi.
It would be good to take some time with the software (and with XML standards) before writing advises...
P.S. you might want to read this (not sure who this guy is, but he looks to think similar to you):
http://cmt-3315.blogspot.com/2011/02/tenth-task.html
I admit it. I was cynical when I started working with XMLSpy. I've always been a "use notepad..." kind of person...I'm a convert now, though, I have to tell you
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