In a current project we are working on XML files coming from a partner company. Readers of my blog can identify that its most likely the same project as here. Unfortunately the XSD is really loose.

Everything is type="xs:string", has minOccurs="0" and maxOccurs="unbounded". And if I say everything I mean all roughly 50 tags that are defined. Okay at least we have some structural information with sequences that might be there or not :-)

Luckily that is not that big issue as I dont need to parse it but some poor JAXB has to do that. And my poor Hibernate has to create amazing database structures to deal with that loose XML. Anyways I didn’t want to make a blog post for this alone. But today I got the confirmation on the filename of these XML files. Watch out:

PREFIX.Timestamp.txt

really, they are named txt instead of xml. With them not having an XML identifier line (<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>), not having a real XSD and not having an XML filename, this isn’t really XML, is it?

Come on, who builds such a thing… as business interface…