Patrick A wrote:
> Thanks for the suggestions, I'll keep at it.
> 
> 
I use 'Oxygen' as my XML editor, and I'm very happy with it.
(look at www.---.com#demo_videos)


It will produce a Schema for you from a set of sample documents, using
a tool it calls the Trang convertor. It will aslo produce one from a DTD
if that is what your XML currently has.

For serious work, you would need to tweak the Schema by hand to 
constrain the data exactly as strictly as you need, but no more,
and you would want to annotate it. Or you might have to unconstrain it, 
making certain elements or attributes optional or of a wider type.


Access will produce a Schema for its own version of XML, which is the
one it wants to import. It isn't as studidly complex as the schemas you 
get for Excel and word, which jumble together presentation and content. 
The Access schemas for simple card-index type database tables are
refreshingly clean and simple for MS.

Depending on the complexity of the Transformation from your XML to the
Access version, I would suggest either straight-forward XSLT (eg using 
saxon as Peter Flynn suggested) or in Python's using 4Suite, which is 
really nice to work with, It knows XPath 1.0, which is the same as the 
free version of Saxon, I believe. (http://4suite.org/index.xhtml)

If you are cautious, you should validate the output XML before feeding 
it to your existing database. Unfortunately 4Suite does not validate 
against Schemas, another reason for using Oxygen.

Oxygen has a free trial which should last long enough for you to 
complete the task. Go straight to the Menubar --> Tools --> Trang 
Converter, and you will have your Schema and rather nice html 
documentation for it in next to no time. Well, perhaps not quite that 
fast if you provide Oxygen with the whole batch of 255 files.

You can get an appropriate heading for your xml by going to Menubar --> 
File --> New... --> XML Document --> and filling in the Dialogue box 
with your Schema. You might want to choose a namespace at this stage
if your 255 files don't already have one.