XML Spy Blog

For the most part, XML Spy seems to not suck. Well, up until I started to do XML Schemas...

6) So if you open a file in a text view, and then go to the enhanced grid view and then back to the text view, the formatting of the text has been altered. It is mostly whitespace stuff. I'm assuming that when you switch to the grid view they just throw away the original text view completely, and then have to regenerate it from the grid view. Pretty stupidly annoying.
5) One thing I like: the tabbed view of documents.
4) They do the same dumb ass thing that IE does: the Search/Replace dialog has a Cancel button that doesn't undo anything. It should be a Close button. Come on.
3) Ha ha! If I have a DTD that includes itself via an ENTITY definition, the program crashes!
2) It won't let me turn off the Auto Completion or Intelligent Editing crap. Sure, there's an option to turn the Intelligent Editing stuff off (but apparently nothing for Auto Complete), but it doesn't actually respect that setting. Maybe it is because I'm using the demo version? If so, they sure do need to be more explicit about it - why on earth would I pay money for something that just appears to not work? The same problem exists with having it Auto Validate files when I'm saving them.

1) It does what looks, to this human, to be a bad job of converting from XML Schema to DTD. (Of course, it could also be that I'm utterly confused by the lame ass W3C docs on the issue of when to use elementOnly vs. other content models!) As an example, I've made a Schema in which I want to have a list of the 'pair' type; a pair only has 'name' and 'value' elements, and does not allow character data (outside of the names and values).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE xsd:schema PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XMLSCHEMA 19991216//EN" "" [
	<!ENTITY % p 'xsd:'>
	<!ENTITY % s ':xsd'>
]>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/1999/XMLSchema">

	<xsd:element name="pair" >
		<xsd:complexType content="elementOnly">
			<xsd:element name="name" type="xsd:string"/>
			<xsd:element name="value" type="xsd:string"/>
		</xsd:complexType>
	</xsd:element>
	
	<xsd:element name="pairList">
		<xsd:complexType>
		<xsd:sequence minOccurs='0' maxOccurs='unbounded'>
			<xsd:element name="pair"/>
		</xsd:sequence>
		</xsd:complexType>
	</xsd:element>

</xsd:schema>

When I convert the thing to a DTD, it doesn't represent the pair type correctly:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--DTD generated by XML Spy v3.0.7 NT (http://www.xmlspy.com)-->
<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT pair (#PCDATA | name | value)*>
<!ELEMENT pairList (pair)*>
<!ELEMENT value (#PCDATA)>

What I think I want it to generate is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--DTD generated by XML Spy v3.0.7 NT (http://www.xmlspy.com)-->
<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT pair (name, value)>
<!ELEMENT pairList (pair)*>
<!ELEMENT value (#PCDATA)>