Create XSD schema file for Instrument definitions and other XML

[Freddie Akeroyd]

This would allow validation of files both before and during mantid loading and also be a source of documentation on the format.

Edit: Other XML in Mantid that should (perhaps) get XSD:

• BoxController XML
• Grouping files XML

[Nick Draper]

Bulk move of tickets to iteration 27, if your ticket is essential for Iteration 26 then move it back.

[Nick Draper]

Bulk move of tickets at the end of iteration 27

[Nick Draper]

Bulk move of tickets at the end of iteration 28

[Nick Draper]

Accepted and assigned tickets moved at iteration 29 code freeze

[Anders Markvardsen]

Definitely a useful ticket to complete, although not critical for the running of Mantid, but is struggling to fit this ticket in at the moment

[Nick Draper]

Bulk move of tickets to iteration 31 at the iteration 30 code freeze

[Anders Markvardsen]

Please note that to complete this ticket the XML schema does not need to cover all aspects of instrument definition langauge initially. Although first version must cover the concept that any number of <component>'s can be a child of a <type> but the other way around, and a <component> is required to contain at least one <location> element.

Further it would be useful if a XML schema could be used to spot if a user adds an attribute to say a <location> element which is not one of those recognised by Mantid a warning is display to the user. This would help the debugging of wrongly typed IDF files.

For now put the schema in the instrument directory. Name it IDFschema dot either xsd or dtd (likely xsd is used).

Note it would likely make sense that the some implementation for reading schema into mantid used in #3780 should be used for this ticket and visa verca.

[Owen Arnold]

Our API for XML processing (POCO) does not seem to support schemas. This seems to me to be a major limitation. I don't know if this is available in newer versions of the Framework? #3780

[Karl Palmen]

I've found on the POCO website ​http://pocoproject.org/documentation/index.html in the 3rd slide of ​http://pocoproject.org/slides/170-XML.pdf that Schemas are not supported by POCO.

[Anders Markvardsen]

Karl has found:

1. Boost does not support schemas
2. A possible XML schema library we may use is Apache Xerces

Note this ticket is like a 2-3 week job, where the most important step is to find and integrate a suitable xml schema reading libraty

[Nick Draper]

Moved to iteration 33 at iteration 32 code freeze

[Nick Draper]

Moved at end of release 2.1

[Russell Taylor]

The subject of this has been raised again over here. It looks as though the previous investigation got hung up over the lack of support for schema validation in Poco. It's not obvious to me that we necessarily need runtime validation. It seems as though, with a schema in place, we could have a set of automated tests that validated all of the IDFs that we will ship via external means (i.e. outside of Mantid).

[Owen Arnold]

I second Russell's proposal.

This sort of functionality is well supported in Java and .Net, so one possibility would be to write it outside our c++/python Mantid framework. In c#, this would just be a few lines. It would be relatively simple to kick-off a process to run the schema validation against all our XSD.

[Nick Draper]

Moved at the end of release 2.2

[Nick Draper]

Moved to milestone 2.4

[Owen Arnold]

All we need is the schema. I'll create a python script as a Jenkins job to go through and validate the schema against each IDF in the instrument folder.

[Nick Draper]

Moved at the code freeze for release 2.4

[Nick Draper]

Moved into 2.6 for early maintenance inclusion

[Nick Draper]

Moved to the Backlog after R2.6

[Anders Markvardsen]

Probably as a separate ticket have when you can

1. open a IDF_Parameters.xml in MantidPlot in a editor that is schema aware

2. same for any IDF_Defintion.xml

[Mike Thomas]

Schemas for IDF Parameters and Facilies XML Refs #1738

Changeset: 5e13994dd79f3341ea116c41d26d5c1ed3c38d1f

[Anders Markvardsen]

To test - check that schema folder exist in instrument folder

[Gesner Passos]

Merge remote-tracking branch 'origin/feature/1738_IDF_Parameters_Facilites_Schemas'

[Gesner Passos]

The folder exists, the schema files are valid.

[Nick Draper]

After the summer contact Anders Markvardsen about these tickets

[Stuart Campbell]

This ticket has been transferred to github issue ​2585