working with white space in an attribute value

[ptc-1787870]

Hi all,

I'm trying to help resolve an error about an invalid attribute value in Arbortext Editor:

[A11054] Invalid value "28999901 060 " for required attribute "refcsn"

The S1000D schema includes an attribute that must have exactly 13 characters. Some of the data has the attribute value looking like this: "28999901 060 "

Note that there is a trailing space in the attribute. To prevent Arbortext Editor from trimming the attribute, there is a white space setting in the schema: <whitespace value="preserve"/>.

Schema:
<xs:attribute name="refcsn">
<xs:simpletype>
<xs:restriction base="xs:string">
<xs:whitespace value="preserve"/">
<xs:length value="13"/">
</xs:restriction>
</xs:simpletype>
</xs:attribute>

Instance:
<csnref refcsn="28999901" 060=" &quot;="/>

Is white space not considered a character for purposes of determining valid length?

Thanks,
Jason






Jason Aiken
Senior Consultant
Airline/Aerospace - Americas
InfoTrust Group, Inc.


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[ebenton]

I'm no schema expert, nor do I play one on TV, but I think that if you
use <xs:attribute name="refscn" type="xs:string"/">, that white space is
supposed to be preserved by default.

[steve.thompson4]

Quotes from the W3C XML Schema Recommendation:

4.3.1 length

[Definition:] length is the number of units of length, where units of
length varies
depending on the type that is being *derived* from. The value of length
*must* be a nonNegativeInteger.

For string and datatypes *derived* from string, length is measured in
units of characters
as defined in [XML 1.0 (Second Edition)].

(result of clicking "characters")

Consequently, XML processors must accept any character in the range
specified for Char.
The use of "compatibility characters", as defined in section 6.8 of
[Unicode] [E67](see
also D21 in section 3.6 of [Unicode3]), is discouraged.]

Character Range
[2] Char ::= #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] |
[#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF]
/* any Unicode character, excluding the
surrogate blocks, FFFE, and FFFF. */


So it would appear that spaces qualify. OTOH, under 'things I found on
the way to other things', some parsers have at times had difficulties
with 'special' characters, mis-counting a string such as "&&&&" by
seeming to 'count' the characters in '&' in place of each ampersand.
That sounds like a digression, but what it demonstrates is that the
rules don't always get followed, no matter the best intentions.
Given that there are attribute dialogs in AE that include 'lists' of
values separated by spaces, this sounds like AE is applying that type of
rule to determining the end of a given string in this context. Thus,
your value containing a space is seen as two values, neither of which is
of adequate length. Not how it 'should' be, per the schema, but how it
is.

Sounds like a PTC Trouble Call candidate, painful as that can be.

Steve Thompson
+1(316)977-0515