Validating XBRL instance documents in .NET
I'm currently working with creation and validation of XBRL instance documents in C#, and I've run into some problems regarding the XBRL instance schema file:
http://www.xbrl.org/2003/xbrl-instance-2003-12-31.xsd
According to the开发者_高级运维 .NET schema validator, the schema is not valid. It throws the following exception:
System.Xml.Schema.XmlSchemaException: If ref is present, all of <complexType>, <simpleType>, <key>, <keyref>, <unique>, nillable, default, fixed, form, block, and type must be absent.
I get the same exception when I try to use the XML Schema Definition Tool (Xsd.exe) to generate a class representation of the schema.
This surprises me since XBRL is used in quite a lot of applications, and I can't find much information about this on the web. The an rather old discussion here which suggest that it depends on the tools used for the validation:
http://www.xml.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/1849
This seems to be right since other schema validators do not complain. XMLSpy, XML Copy Editor and also w3's own validator
http://www.w3.org/2001/03/webdata/xsv#hlp-addr
validates the schema without any problems, where as XMLFox reports the same problem as .NET.
So my questions are:
- Is the XBRL instance schema valid? I suspect that the schema spec. might be unclear, so the authors of the different tool interpret it differently.
- What should I do if I want to work with the schema in .NET? Can you as a programmer, alter the validation engine rules in any way? Are there any other possibilities than the validation mechanisms in System.XML.Schema? Perhaps third party tool as Xerces in the Java world?
Thanks
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