4.4.2 XML Syntax and Validation

The XML configuration file must follow these syntax rules:

• The syntax is XML; the character encoding is UTF-8.
• Opening tags are enclosed in <>; closing tags are enclosed in </>.
• A tag value is a UTF-8 encoded string. Legal values are alphanumeric characters. The routing service’s parser will remove all leading and trailing spaces1 Leading and trailing spaces in enumeration fields will not be considered valid if you use the distributed XSD document to do validation at run-time with a code editor. from the string before it is processed.

For example, " <tag> value </tag>" is the same as "<tag>value</tag>".

• All values are case-sensitive unless otherwise stated.

• Comments are enclosed as follows: <!-- comment -->.

• The root tag of the configuration file must be <dds> and end with </dds>.

Database Integration Service provides DTD and XSD files that describe the format of the XML content. We recommend including a reference to one of these documents in the XML file that contains the Database Integration Service’s configuration—this provides helpful features in code editors such as Visual Studio and Eclipse, including validation and auto-completion while you are editing the XML file.

The DTD and XSD definitions of the XML elements are in

<Database Integration Service installation directory>/resource/schema/rti_real_time_connect.dtd

and

<Database Integration Service installation directory>/resource/schema/rti_real_time_connect.xsd, respectively.

To include a reference to the XSD document in your XML file, use the attribute xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation in the <dds> tag. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<dds xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 

xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation= "<NDDSHOME>/resource/schema/rti_real_time_connect.xsd">

   ...

</dds>

<NDDSHOME> is described in 1.2 Paths Mentioned in Documentation.

To include a reference to the DTD document in your XML file, use the <!DOCTYPE> tag.

For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE dds SYSTEM "<NDDSHOME>/resource/schema/rti_routing_service.dtd">

<dds>

   ...

</dds>

We recommend including a reference to the XSD file in the XML documents; this provides stricter validation and better auto-completion than the corresponding DTD file.