What's the best way to validate an XML file against an XSD file?

Question

I\'m generating some xml files that needs to conform to an xsd file that was given to me. What\'s the best way to verify they conform?

Answer 1

Using Woodstox, configure the StAX parser to validate against your schema and parse the XML.

If exceptions are caught the XML is not valid, otherwise it is valid:

// create the XSD schema from your schema file
XMLValidationSchemaFactory schemaFactory = XMLValidationSchemaFactory.newInstance(XMLValidationSchema.SCHEMA_ID_W3C_SCHEMA);
XMLValidationSchema validationSchema = schemaFactory.createSchema(schemaInputStream);

// create the XML reader for your XML file
WstxInputFactory inputFactory = new WstxInputFactory();
XMLStreamReader2 xmlReader = (XMLStreamReader2) inputFactory.createXMLStreamReader(xmlInputStream);

try {
    // configure the reader to validate against the schema
    xmlReader.validateAgainst(validationSchema);

    // parse the XML
    while (xmlReader.hasNext()) {
        xmlReader.next();
    }

    // no exceptions, the XML is valid

} catch (XMLStreamException e) {

    // exceptions, the XML is not valid

} finally {
    xmlReader.close();
}

Note: If you need to validate multiple files, you should try to reuse your XMLInputFactory and XMLValidationSchema in order to maximize the performance.