The purchase order schema is contained in the file po.xsd:

The purchase order schema consists of a schema element and a variety of subelements, most notably element, complexType, and simpleType which determine the appearance of elements and their content in instance documents.

Each of the elements in the schema has a prefix xsd: which is associated with the XML Schema namespace through the declaration, xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema", that appears in the schema element. The prefix xsd: is used by convention to denote the XML Schema namespace, although any prefix can be used. The same prefix, and hence the same association, also appears on the names of built-in simple types, e.g. xsd:string. The purpose of the association is to identify the elements and simple types as belonging to the vocabulary of the XML Schema language rather than the vocabulary of the schema author. For the sake of clarity in the text, we just mention the names of elements and simple types (e.g. simpleType), and omit the prefix.

In XML Schema, there is a basic difference between complex types which allow elements in their content and may carry attributes, and simple types which cannot have element content and cannot carry attributes. There is also a major distinction between definitions which create new types (both simple and complex), and declarations which enable elements and attributes with specific names and types (both simple and complex) to appear in document instances. In this section, we focus on defining complex types and declaring the elements and attributes that appear within them.

New complex types are defined using the complexType element and such definitions typically contain a set of element declarations, element references, and attribute declarations. The declarations are not themselves types, but rather an association between a name and the constraints which govern the appearance of that name in documents governed by the associated schema. Elements are declared using the element element, and attributes are declared using the attribute element. For example, USAddress is defined as a complex type, and within the definition of USAddress we see five element declarations and one attribute declaration:

The consequence of this definition is that any element appearing in an instance whose type is declared to be USAddress (e.g. shipTo in po.xml) must consist of five elements and one attribute. These elements must be called name, street, city, state and zip as specified by the values of the declarations' name attributes, and the elements must appear in the same sequence (order) in which they are declared. The first four of these elements will each contain a string, and the fifth will contain a number. The element whose type is declared to be USAddress may appear with an attribute called country which must contain the string US.

The USAddress definition contains only declarations involving the simple types: string, decimal and NMTOKEN. In contrast, the PurchaseOrderType definition contains element declarations involving complex types, e.g. USAddress, although note that both declarations use the same type attribute to identify the type, regardless of whether the type is simple or complex.

In defining PurchaseOrderType, two of the element declarations, for shipTo and billTo, associate different element names with the same complex type, namely USAddress. The consequence of this definition is that any element appearing in an instance document (e.g. po.xml) whose type is declared to be PurchaseOrderType must consist of elements named shipTo and billTo, each containing the five subelements (name, street, city, state and zip) that were declared as part of USAddress. The shipTo and billTo elements may also carry the country attribute that was declared as part of USAddress.

The PurchaseOrderType definition contains an orderDate attribute declaration which, like the country attribute declaration, identifies a simple type. In fact, all attribute declarations must reference simple types because, unlike element declarations, attributes cannot contain other elements or other attributes.

The element declarations we have described so far have each associated a name with an existing type definition. Sometimes it is preferable to use an existing element rather than declare a new element, for example:

This declaration references an existing element, comment, that was declared elsewhere in the purchase order schema. In general, the value of the ref attribute must reference a global element, i.e. one that has been declared under schema rather than as part of a complex type definition. The consequence of this declaration is that an element called comment may appear in an instance document, and its content must be consistent with that element's type, in this case, string.

The purchase order schema declares several elements and attributes that have simple types. Some of these simple types, such as string and decimal, are built in to XML Schema, while others are derived from the built-in's. For example, the partNum attribute has a type called SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) that is derived from string. Both built-in simple types and their derivations can be used in all element and attribute declarations. Table 2 lists all the simple types built in to XML Schema, along with examples of the different types.

New simple types are defined by deriving them from existing simple types (built-in's and derived). In particular, we can derive a new simple type by restricting an existing simple type, in other words, the legal range of values for the new type are a subset of the existing type's range of values. We use the simpleType element to define and name the new simple type. We use the restriction element to indicate the existing (base) type, and to identify the "facets" that constrain the range of values. A complete list of facets is provided in Appendix B.

Suppose we wish to create a new type of integer called myInteger whose range of values is between 10000 and 99999 (inclusive). We base our definition on the built-in simple type integer, whose range of values also includes integers less than 10000 and greater than 99999. To define myInteger, we restrict the range of the integer base type by employing two facets called minInclusive and maxInclusive:

The example shows one particular combination of a base type and two facets used to define myInteger, but a look at the list of built-in simple types and their facets (Appendix B) should suggest other viable combinations.

The purchase order schema contains another, more elaborate, example of a simple type definition. A new simple type called SKU is derived (by restriction) from the simple type string. Furthermore, we constrain the values of SKU using a facet called pattern in conjunction with the regular expression "\d{3}-[A-Z]{2}" that is read "three digits followed by a hyphen followed by two upper-case ASCII letters":

This regular expression language is described more fully in Appendix D.

XML Schema defines twelvefifteen facets which are listed in Appendix B. Among these, the enumeration facet is particularly useful and it can be used to constrain the values of almost every simple type, except the boolean type. The enumeration facet limits a simple type to a set of distinct values. For example, we can use the enumeration facet to define a new simple type called USState, derived from string, whose value must be one of the standard US state abbreviations:

USState would be a good replacement for the string type currently used in the state element declaration. By making this replacement, the legal values of a state element, i.e. the state subelements of billTo and shipTo, would be limited to one of AK, AL, AR, etc. Note that the enumeration values specified for a particular type must be unique.

Schemas can be constructed by defining sets of named types such as PurchaseOrderType and then declaring elements such as purchaseOrder that reference the types using the type= construction. This style of schema construction is straightforward but it can be unwieldy, especially if you define many types that are referenced only once and contain very few constraints. In these cases, a type can be more succinctly defined as an anonymous type which saves the overhead of having to be named and explicitly referenced.

The definition of the type Items in po.xsd contains two element declarations that use anonymous types (item and quantity). In general, you can identify anonymous types by the lack of a type= in an element (or attribute) declaration, and by the presence of an un-named (simple or complex) type definition:

In the case of the item element, it has an anonymous complex type consisting of the elements productName, quantity, USPrice, comment, and shipDate, and an attribute called partNum. In the case of the quantity element, it has an anonymous simple type derived from integer positiveInteger whose value ranges between 1 and 99.

The purchase order schema has many examples of elements containing other elements (e.g. items), elements having attributes and containing other elements (e.g. shipTo), and elements containing only a simple type of value (e.g. USPrice). However, we have not seen an element having attributes but containing only a simple type of value, nor have we seen an element that contains other elements mixed with character content, nor have we seen an element that has no content at all. In this section we'll examine these variations in the content models of elements.

XML Schema provides three elements for annotating schemas for the benefit of both human readers and applications. In the purchase order schema, we put a basic schema description and copyright information inside the documentation element, which is the recommended location for human readable material. We recommend you use the xml:lang attribute with any documentation elements to indicate the language of the information. Alternatively, you may indicate the language of all information in a schema by placing an xml:lang attribute on the schema element.

The appinfoappInfo element, which we did not use in the purchase order schema, can be used to provide information for tools, stylesheets and other applications. An interesting example using appinfoappInfo is a schema that describes the simple types in XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes. Information describing this schema, e.g. which facets are applicable to particular simple types, is represented inside appinfoappInfo elements, and this information was used by an application to automatically generate text for the XML Schema Part 2 document.

Both documentation and appinfoappInfo appear as subelements of annotation, which may itself appear at the beginning of most schema constructions. To illustrate, the following example shows annotation elements appearing at the beginning of an element declaration and a complex type definition:

The annotation element may also appear at the beginning of other schema constructions such as those indicated by the elements schema, simpleType, and attribute.

The definitions of complex types in the purchase order schema all declare sequences of elements that must appear in the instance document. The occurrence of individual elements declared in the so-called content models of these types may be optional, as indicated by a 0 value for the attribute minOccurs (e.g. in comment), or be otherwise constrained depending upon the values of minOccurs and maxOccurs. XML Schema also provides constraints that apply to groups of elements appearing in a content model. These constraints mirror those available in XML 1.0 plus some additional constraints. Note that the constraints do not apply to attributes.

XML Schema enables groups of elements to be defined and named, so that the elements can be used to build up the content models of complex types (thus mimicking common usage of parameter entities in XML 1.0). Un-named groups of elements can also be defined, and along with elements in named groups, they can be constrained to appear in the same order (sequence) as they are declared. Alternatively, they can be constrained so that only one of the elements may appear in an instance.

To illustrate, we introduce two groups into the PurchaseOrderType definition from the purchase order schema so that purchase orders may contain either separate shipping and billing addresses, or a single address for those cases in which the shippee and billee are co-located:

The choice group element allows only one of its children to appear in an instance. One child is an inner group element that references the named group shipAndBill consisting of the element sequence shipTo, billTo, and the second child is a singleUSAddress. Hence, in an instance document, the purchaseOrder element must contain either a shipTo element followed by a billTo element or a singleUSAddress element. The choice group is followed by the comment and items element declarations, and both the choice group and the element declarations are children of a sequence group. The effect of these various groups is that the address element(s) must be followed by comment and items elements in that order.

There exists a third option for constraining elements in a group: All the elements in the group may appear once or not at all, and they may appear in any order. The all group (which provides a simplified version of the SGML &-Connector) is limited to the top-level of any content model. Moreover, the group's children must all be individual elements (no groups), and no element in the content model may appear more than once, i.e. the permissible values of minOccurs and maxOccurs are 0 and 1. For example, to allow the child elements of purchaseOrder to appear in any order, we could redefine PurchaseOrderType as:

By this definition, a comment element may optionally appear within purchaseOrder, and it may appear before or after any shipTo, billTo and items elements, but it can appear only once. Moreover, the stipulations of an all group do not allow us to declare an element such as comment outside the group as a means of enabling it to appear more than once. XML Schema stipulates that an all group must appear as the sole child at the top of a content model. In other words, the following is illegal:

Finally, named and un-named groups that appear in content models (represented by group and choice, sequence, all respectively) may carry minOccurs and maxOccurs attributes. By combining and nesting the various groups provided by XML Schema, and by setting the values of minOccurs and maxOccurs, it is possible to represent any content model expressible with an XML 1.0 DTD. Furthermore, the all group provides additional expressive power.

Suppose we want to provide more information about each item in a purchase order, for example, each item's weight and preferred shipping method. We can accomplish this by adding weightKg and shipBy attribute declarations to the item element's (anonymous) type definition:

Alternatively, we can create a named attribute group containing all the desired attributes of an item element, and reference this group by name in the item element declaration:

Using an attribute group in this way can improve the readability of schemas, and facilitates updating schemas because an attribute group can be defined and edited in one place and referenced in multiple definitions and declarations. These characteristics of attribute groups make them similar to parameter entities in XML 1.0. Note that an attribute group may contain other attribute groups. Note also that both attribute declarations and attribute group references must appear at the end of complex type definitions.

One of the purchase order items listed in po.xml, the Lawnmower, does not have a shipDate element. Within the context of our scenario, the schema author may have intended such absences to indicate items not yet shipped. But in general, the absence of an element does not have any particular meaning: It may indicate that the information is unknown, or not applicable, or the element may be absent for some other reason. Sometimes it is desirable to represent an unshipped item, unknown information, or inapplicable information explicitly with an element, rather than by an absent element. For example, it may be desirable to represent a "null" value being sent to or from a relational database with an element that is present. Such cases can be represented using XML Schema's nil mechanism which enables an element to appear with or without a non-nil value.

XML Schema's nil mechanism involves an "out of band" nil signal. In other words, there is no actual nil value that appears as element content, instead there is an attribute to indicate that the element content is nil. To illustrate, we modify the shipDate element declaration so that nils can be signalled:

And to explicitly represent that shipDate has a nil value in the instance document, we set the nil attribute (from the XML Schema namespace for instances) to true:

The nil attribute is defined as part of the XML Schema namespace for instances, http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance, and so it must appear in the instance document with a prefix (such as xsi:) associated with that namespace. (As with the xsd: prefix, the xsi: prefix is used by convention only.) Note that the nil mechanism applies only to element values, and not to attribute values. An element with xsi:nil="true" may not have any element content but it may still carry attributes.

In a new version of the purchase order schema, po1.xsd, we explicitly declare a target namespace, and specify that both locally defined elements and locally defined attributes must be unqualified. The target namespace in po1.xsd is http://www.example.com/PO1, as indicated by the value of the targetNamespace attribute.

Qualification of local elements and attributes can be globally specified by a pair of attributes, elementFormDefault and attributeFormDefault, on the schema element, or can be specified separately for each local declaration using the form attribute. All such attributes' values may each be set to unqualified or qualified, to indicate whether or not locally declared elements and attributes must be unqualified.

In po1.xsd we globally specify the qualification of elements and attributes by setting the values of both elementFormDefault and attributeFormDefault to unqualified. Strictly speaking, these settings are unnecessary because the values are the defaults for the two attributes; we make them here to highlight the contrast between this case and other cases we describe later.

To see how the target namespace of this schema is populated, we examine in turn each of the type definitions and element declarations. Starting from the end of the schema, we first define a type called USAddress that consists of the elements name, street, etc. One consequence of this type definition is that the USAddress type is included in the schema's target namespace. We next define a type called PurchaseOrderType that consists of the elements shipTo, billTo, comment, etc. PurchaseOrderType is also included in the schema's target namespace. Notice that the type references in the three element declarations are prefixed, i.e. po:USAddress, po:USAddress and po:comment, and the prefix is associated with the namespace http://www.example.com/PO1. This is the same namespace as the schema's target namespace, and so a processor of this schema will know to look within this schema for the definition of the type USAddress and the declaration of the element comment. It is also possible to refer to types in another schema with a different target namespace, hence enabling re-use of definitions and declarations between schemas.

At the beginning of the schema po1.xsd, we declare the elements purchaseOrder and comment. They are included in the schema's target namespace. The purchaseOrder element's type is prefixed, for the same reason that USAddress is prefixed. In contrast, the comment element's type, string, is not prefixed. The po1.xsd schema contains a default namespace declaration, and so unprefixed types such as string and unprefixed elements such as element and complexType are associated with the default namespace http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema. In fact, this is the target namespace of XML Schema itself, and so a processor of po1.xsd will know to look within the schema of XML Schema -- otherwise known as the "schema for schemas" -- for the definition of the type string and the declaration of the element called element.

Let us now examine how the target namespace of the schema affects a conforming instance document:

The instance document declares one namespace, http://www.example.com/PO1, and associates it with the prefix apo:. This prefix is used to qualify two elements in the document, namely purchaseOrder and comment. The namespace is the same as the target namespace of the schema in po1.xsd, and so a processor of the instance document will know to look in that schema for the declarations of purchaseOrder and comment. In fact, target namespaces are so named because of the sense in which there exists a target namespace for the elements purchaseOrder and comment. Target namespaces in the schema therefore control the validation of corresponding namespaces in the instance.

The prefix apo: is applied to the global elements purchaseOrder and comment elements. Furthermore, elementFormDefault and attributeFormDefault require that the prefix is not applied to any of the locally declared elements such as shipTo, billTo, name and street, and it is not applied to any of the attributes (which were all declared locally). The purchaseOrder and comment are global elements because they are declared in the context of the schema as a whole rather than within the context of a particular type. For example, the declaration of purchaseOrder appears as a child of the schema element in po1.xsd, whereas the declaration of shipTo appears as a child of the complexType element that defines PurchaseOrderType.

When local elements and attributes are not required to be qualified, an instance author may require more or less knowledge about the details of the schema to create schema valid instance documents. More specifically, if the author can be sure that only the root element (such as purchaseOrder) is global, then it is a simple matter to qualify only the root element. Alternatively, the author may know that all the elements are declared globally, and so all the elements in the instance document can be prefixed, perhaps taking advantage of a default namespace declaration. (We examine this approach in .) On the other hand, if there is no uniform pattern of global and local declarations, the author will need detailed knowledge of the schema to correctly prefix global elements and attributes.

Elements and attributes can be independently required to be qualified, although we start by describing the qualification of local elements. To specify that all locally declared elements in a schema must be qualified, we set the value of elementFormDefault to qualified:

And in this conforming instance document, we qualify all the elements explicitly:

Alternatively, we can replace the explicit qualification of every element with implicit qualification provided by a default namespace, as shown here in po2.xml:

In po2.xml, all the elements in the instance belong to the same namespace, and the namespace statement declares a default namespace that applies to all the elements in the instance. Hence, it is unnecessary to explicitly prefix any of the elements. As another illustration of using qualified elements, the schemas in all require qualified elements.

Qualification of attributes is very similar to the qualification of elements. Attributes that must be qualified, either because they are declared globally or because the attributeFormDefault attribute is set to qualified, appear prefixed in instance documents. One example of a qualified attribute is the xsi:nil attribute that was introduced in . In fact, attributes that are required to be qualified must be explicitly prefixed because the Namespaces in XML specification does not provide a mechanism for defaulting the namespaces of attributes. Attributes that are not required to be qualified appear in instance documents without prefixes, which is the typical case.

The qualification mechanism we have described so far has controlled all local element and attribute declarations within a particular target namespace. It is also possible to control qualification on a declaration by declaration basis using the form attribute. For example, to require that the locally declared attribute publicKey is qualified in instances, we declare it in the following way:

Notice that the value of the form attribute overrides the value of the attributeFormDefault attribute for the publicKey attribute only. Also, the form attribute can be applied to an element declaration in the same manner. An instance document that conforms to the schema is:

Another authoring style, applicable when all element names are unique within a namespace, is to create schemas in which all elements are global. This is similar in effect to the use of <!ELEMENT> in a DTD. In the example below, we have modified the original po1.xsd such that all the elements are declared globally. Notice that we have omitted the elementFormDefault and attributeFormDefault attributes in this example to emphasize that their values are irrelevant when there are only global element and attribute declarations.

This "global" version of po1.xsd will validate the instance document po2.xml which, as we described previously, is also schema valid against the "qualified" version of po1.xsd. In other words, both schema approaches can validate the same, namespace defaulted, document. Thus, in one respect the two schema approaches are similar, although in another important respect the two schema approaches are very different. Specifically, when all elements are declared globally, it is not possible to take advantage of local names. For example, you can only declare one global element called "title". However, you can locally declare one element called "title" that has a string type, and is a subelement of "book". Within the same schema (target namespace) you can declare a second element also called "title" that is an enumeration of the values "Mr Mrs Ms".

In we explained the basics of XML Schema using a schema that did not declare a target namespace and an instance document that did not declare a namespace. So the question naturally arises: What is the target namespace in these examples and how is it referenced?

In the purchase order schema, po.xsd, we did not declare a target namespace for the schema, nor did we declare a prefix (like po: above) associated with the schema's target namespace with which we could refer to types and elements defined and declared within the schema. The consequence of not declaring a target namespace in a schema is that the definitions and declarations from that schema, such as USAddress and purchaseOrder, are referenced without namespace qualification. In other words there is no explicit namespace prefix applied to the references nor is there any implicit namespace applied to the reference by default. So for example, the purchaseOrder element is declared using the type reference PurchaseOrderType. In contrast, all the XML Schema elements and types used in po.xsd are explicitly qualified with the prefix xsd: that is associated with the XML Schema namespace.

In cases where a schema is designed without a target namespace, it is strongly recommended that all XML Schema elements and types are explicitly qualified with a prefix such as xsd: that is associated with the XML Schema namespace (as in po.xsd). The rationale for this recommendation is that if XML Schema elements and types are associated with the XML Schema namespace by default, i.e. without prefixes, then references to XML Schema types may not be distinguishable from references to user-defined types.

Element declarations from a schema with no target namespace validate unqualified elements in the instance document. That is, they validate elements for which no namespace qualification is provided by either an explicit prefix or by default (xmlns:). So, to validate a traditional XML 1.0 document which does not use namespaces at all, you must provide a schema with no target namespace. Of course, there are many XML 1.0 documents that do not use namespaces, so there will be many schema documents written without target namespaces; you must be sure to give to your processor a schema document that corresponds to the vocabulary you wish to validate.

As schemas become larger, it is often desirable to divide their content among several schema documents for purposes such as ease of maintenance, access control, and readability. For these reasons, we have taken the schema constructs concerning addresses out of po.xsd, and put them in a new file called address.xsd. The modified purchase order schema file is called ipo.xsd:

The file containing the address constructs is:

The various purchase order and address constructions are now contained in two schema files, ipo.xsd and address.xsd. To include these constructions as part of the international purchase order schema, in other words to include them in the international purchase order's namespace, ipo.xsd contains the include element:

The effect of this include element is to bring in the definitions and declarations contained in address.xsd, and make them available as part of the international purchase order schema target