XML Tribune

Recently I decided to add the TrialPay offer to the payment options for XML ValidatorBuddy. I already learned about TrialPay months ago but never took the time to set up a product or just even to create an account. Of course it doesn’t take just “5 minutes” as TrialPays says but after one hour I successfully added ValidatorBuddy as a new product. Now I have to wait until it gets approved and then I can add a link to the TrialPay page as an additional payment option to my web pages.

We will see if the typical ValidatorBuddy user, and close-but-not-really customer, also likes one of the TrialPay offers…

I just stumbled over this very good blog: http://blog.asmartbear.com/

Definitely worth reading if you run a microISV.

You might have read this already in the Altova newsletter or via some press release. Altova released new versions of all products a couple of days ago with a lot of additional benefits for the users. Of course you can go directly to Altova and read all about it but there are also some articles on XML Aficionado which explain the major new features in a more personal way. A good starting point to digg deeper because every article also has a lot of links pointing directly to the pages for a more detailed description of the current topic.

The row of articles on XML Aficionado about the latest release of Altova are:

• A general overview about the whole release
• Amazing database merge and differencing in DiffDog 2009 and DatabaseSpy 2009
• Intelligent XPath auto-completion. Extremly useful especially on editing XSL! I know no better implementation of XPath auto-completion in any other software.
• Expanded support for repositories (source code control)
• Identity constraints made easy in XMLSpy

Sometimes I get feedback from people who are installing XML ValidatorBuddy that there was “no application visible” after running the installer or like “didn’t install at all”.

I know that most of the people expect some program to run or a desktop icon to appear after the installation of any new software. I was thinking about this for XML ValidatorBuddy also but nothing useful came to my mind until yet. The reason for this is that currently ValidatorBuddy doesn’t have any real executable beside the command-line tool. So let me summarize what is offered now:

1. A Windows File Explorer shell extension to provide quick and easy access to XML validation and batch processing.
2. A command-line tool to allow scheduled batch processing like XML validation of thousand of files.
3. A plugin for the popular XML editor Altova XMLSpy.

As you can see no obvious way to start anything after installation to present it to the user. Of yourse, any ideas are much appreciated!

A few weeks ago I removed all PAD files from my server because I was tired of updating the content and I never noticed any real traffic coming from all of the download sites anyways. The whole PAD file misery was already discussed in detail and if you want to know more you can read a lot about it here. Just search the blog for PAD

Every now and then I get a PAD polling error sent by one of the many download sites I added my PAD file in the past. Of course this is also a little bit strange because those sites are actually of a higher quality and to appear there could also be a benefit. But the vast majority of sites where my PAD is known don’t care if it is still accessible or not. They just took the details from the PAD to fill there own pages with content to get hits for advertising. With a lot of “stolen” content and a lot of links they get a high page rank pushing your own sites from the first pages of the search results. Nothing new here…

To come to an end. If you consider to submit to hundreds or thousands of download pages please don’t do it. Add you software to some selected places like download.com (even the free of charge plan) or tucows.com if you are a patient guy and provide content instead. Don’t waste time to get registered anywhere just to bring clicks to other people.

Today I read by chance a post in the oXygen XML editor forum (here) if it is possible to get the XSL which is used in the last step of Schematron validation to validate the XML instance. To make it short: in oXygen there is no special functionality for it, with ValidatorBuddy in XMLSpy you get it with one click.

Some background: Usually, to validate a XML instance document using Schematron a XSL stylesheet which is generated from the Schematron schema is applied to the input XML. To generate the XSL to validate the XML another XSL stylesheet that implements the Schematron definition is used. In addition you also need to do some pre-processing to resolve the includes at least. Guess what, this is also done with the help of a stylesheet.

To simplify this for the user and to save time XML ValidatorBuddy has a button to get the final XSL used to validate the XML with one click:

Get XSLT button for Schematron

On the upper-right corner you can see the “Get XSLT” button. If a Schematron stylesheet is assigned to the XML a new .xsl document will be created in XMLSpy with the stylesheet to validate any instance document.

You can then save this stylesheet and apply it to any XML with simple XSL transformation or you can use it to debug the Schematron schema in the built-in debugger of XMLSpy.

This is a little bit off-topic for an XML related blog but I never promised here that I will always be on-topic :-).

So we learned last week that Windows 7 will have the version number 6.1 from Mike Nash here on the Windows Vista Blog. Beside the somehow creative counting of previous Windows versions to get to number 7 for the successor of Windows Vista the main argument for taking 6.1 as version information is compatibility. Hm, … Mike tells us that at Microsoft they are afraid to break a lot of end-user software if the version number is changed to 7.0 and of course they don’t want to.

Honestly I can’t tell for others but usually when it comes to version checking in software I have in mind that:

1. I add code to check for the minimum version the tool/application supports. So the code shouldn’t have problems if the new version is 7.0 or 6.1. How can I predict the future and say that a change to the minor version is ok but a change to the major is not? What is if the minor version breaks something which is fixed then in the next major release? Never happened before?
2. I hope that driver compatibility is not decided on the version number of the operating system and there is a more complex way to tell if a driver should be installed in the system then two (or actually in this case only one) digit. But I have to admit that I never wrote a driver for Windows.
3. For serious problems with compatibility Windows can already run in a mode faking a previous version of the OS to the application. So where is the point to have “better compatibility” in setting a version number?

Internet Explorer is really strange. Yesterday I noticed that the empty cells in the “General” column of the generated HTML from the validation log coming from XML ValidatorBuddy were not shown. I mean no borders are around them but the <td> elements are present.

So I took a look at the CSS styles of the HTML and set the empty-cells style to “show”. No difference. IE still didn’t show the empty cells. I thought to myself: “There is a style named “empty-cells” and you can set it to “show” but even then empty cells are not shown, well …”

As usual the next step is to search the Internet. Looking for “empty-cells show” gives a lot of hits complaining that this is not working in IE. Ok, at least I’m not alone with the problem. Luckily there are also some hints how to solve it. I choose the “border-collapse: collapse” approach. How stupid I am that I didn’t know right from the start that collapsing the borders is the way to show empty cells. I mean there is nothing more obvious…

Anyways, the output of the sample XSL transformation of the ValidatorBuddy batch validation log looks much better now:

Validation report HTML with borders

Having the results of the XML batch validation as a log document in XML format is nice but giving the option to automatically run a XSL transformation on the log is even nicer. Therefore I added to the upcoming release 2.5 of XML ValidatorBuddy a task which runs any stylesheet after the batch has finished to produce any other possible text output from the log file.

The batch dialog of ValidatorBuddy got the new “Transform output file” option in the Output file settings group:

Output file settings

On clicking the “Configure…” button a dialog appears where you can select the XSL stylesheet and the name of the output file to generate:

Configure output transformation

In this case ValidatorBuddy will execute the batch and take the valbuddy_log.xslt afterwards to transform the output log to the AltovaExamples.html file. Please note that you need to have the free AltovaXML parser installed in order to successfully run this transformation.

Of course you can specify any XSL here to create the output you need but the installer of ValidatorBuddy will put the sample valbuddy_log.xslt I created into the installation folder. This way you can get HTML from your log without any extra effort on your side.

To create the XSL I used the quite impressive Altova Stylevision tool. I have to admit that I’m not really an expert in writing XSL stylesheets and it would take me hours just to have this rather simple XSL working. But there is no need to be an expert in XSL when you use Stylevision. Just design the layout and select the output type you want to create from your input XML. In my case I just did a few drag-and-drop operations, added two XPath based conditions to have a green background if a file is valid and a red if the file is invalid. Then I told Stylevision to produce the XSL for me an save it. Voilà! It took me about 20 minutes and that without being a stylesheets guru.

Validation log transformed to HTML

All of this is available in XML ValidatorBuddy 2.5 coming soon…