[XML-SIG] Advice On Testing With XML

[Peter A. Bigot]

I don't grasp exactly what you're trying to do, but if you need a 
program that generates XML documents that conform to a schema for which 
date values are relative to today, I agree having the harness write the 
older date seems to make sense.

If generateDS doesn't fully support all the XML Schema date types, you 
could do that using PyXB with a program like this:

  import schema
  import pyxb.binding.datatypes as xsd
  import datetime

  delta = xsd.duration('P3D')

  s = schema.instance()
  s.setElt(datetime.date.today() - delta)
  print s.toxml()

with output:

 <?xml version="1.0" ?><instance><elt>2009-07-06</elt></instance>

assuming the schema is:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <xs:element name="instance" type="structure"/>
    <xs:complexType name="structure">
      <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element name="elt" minOccurs="0" type="xs:date"/>
      </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>
  </xs:schema>

PyXB (see http://pyxb.sourceforge.net) is definitely beta software, but 
it's coming along nicely.  It makes a strong effort to validate the data 
written into the binding instances (in fact, a weakness is that you 
can't stop it from trying to validate).  It can also handle very complex 
schemas, such as those from OpenGIS.

If you really need to change the type of an element in a complex type at 
runtime, it could be done by generating a customized binding (though 
you'd have to modify the runtime support class 
pyxb.binding.basis.element to allow this particular kind of customization).

Peter

Tennis Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking for some guidence in handling a testing issue.  I'm new to 
> XML/XSLT, so please bear with me.
>
> First, a little background.  My charter is to generate XML test 
> messages to make sure we process them correctly.  These messages are 
> validated against a schema.  I'm using generateDS to generate the test 
> messages.  This ensures the xml is correct.
>
> Everything works great except for one problem that keeps cropping up.  
> Some elements cannot be defined easily ahead of time when generating 
> the final test document. 
>
> For example, a field of type "xs:date" will have to be modifed because 
> tests are based on a relative date, not an absolute one. That is, 
> dates in tests are based on things like "3 days before today".
>
> Therefore, I'd like to figure out some way to change certain fields 
> like date so that I can pass a string and _still validate_ it against 
> the schema.  Using the example, "-3" would be passed in the date field 
> so that the test harness will recognize it as "today - 3 days". 
>
> Put another way, the goal is to make this:
> /  <xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="0" name="date" type="xs:date"/>/
> ...behave like this:
>  /<xs:element maxOccurs="1" minOccurs="0" name="date" type="xs:string"/>/
>
> Naturally, I can edit and copy/paste into a completely new schema 
> file. But I was hoping someone could tell me if I can do some kind of 
> XSLT or whatever to get the same effect.
>
> Thanks,
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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