Xml: All the way or none at all

time to read 5 min | 849 words

Andrey has reminded me that there are some advantages to XML, such as the ability to define an XSD and get intellisense, or to use standard stuff such as xinclude, out of preverse sense of curiousity, I tried to do this to an SSIS package:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<DTS:Executable xmlns:DTS="www.microsoft.com/SqlServer/Dts"

                DTS:ExecutableType="MSDTS.Package.1"

                xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">

 

  <xi:include href="file:///D:/xinclude.xml"/>

 

</DTS:Executable>

I simple moved everything out to the xinclude.xml, wasn't surprised when it didn't work. A lot of the features of XML require an extra action on the side of the parsing code, such as explicitly asking for resolving XInclude, and most of the time that is never supported by the tools. And while XSD schema + intellisense is nice, do you really want to write something like an SSIS package using plain XML + intellisense?