St. Louis XML Training April 2015

PDS node personnel will be meeting in person and via web conference on Monday, 20 April 2015, prior to the PDS Management Council Meeting, to share some tips and techniques for working with the PDS schema library and (mainly) the oXygen Editor. This page lists some topics we plan to cover, with some references and some file sets we'll use as samples and examples.

Topics

Not necessarily in chronological order, but this seems like a logical organization to start with:

The XML Prolog

The XML prolog is everything that preceeds the document root. We'll walk through a typical prolog, what you might find, and what you should see in a PDS4 label.

Referencing Schemas

The PDS4 schema collection is actually rather complicated. We'll demonstrate how to reference the dozen or so schemas needed to validate a single, non-trivial label, and talk about ways to code those references into labels to maximize transportability.

Setting Up a Work Environment

At UMD we have half a dozen different people working on various aspects of development, migration, and validation; and each of us will be working on data from a variety of different sources. I'll demonstrate the directory structures and XML catalog files we're using to maximize transportability and commonality. The same technique can be extended to the data provider's side as well.

Label Creation with Oxygen

I'll run through configuring the Oxygen editor for validating, and demonstrate the detailed process of creating a new, non-trivial PDS4 label and testing that all schema references are working as desired. The process is similar in Eclipse, though at the moment I'm only planning to focus on Oxygen. If you want to see the same thing in Eclipse, let me know.

Label Templates and Programming Technique

This'll probably be shorter than you'd think, but I will walk through a brute-force program I wrote to convert some Deep Impact labels from PDS3 to PDS4 as a demonstration of what moving to the XML paradigm buys us in development time-savers.

If you have additional topics or questions along these lines that you'd like to see covered, let me know. I can't guarantee to hit them, but we'll try.