xmllint : validate an XML file against two XSD schemas (envelope / payload)

Question

I am using xmllint to do some validations and I have an XML instance document which needs to validate against two schemas: one for the outer \"envelope\" (which includes an

Answer 1

If you had an import element in your A.xsd, right after opening the schema tag,

<xsd:import namespace="http://www.example.org/B" schemaLocation="B.xsd"/>

then you could pass A.xsd to xmllint and it would work with:

xmllint -schema A.xsd ab.xml

Answer 2

You can create a wrapper schema and import both namespaces. AB.xsd:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<schema elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <import namespace="http://www.example.org/A" schemaLocation="A.xsd"/>
    <import namespace="http://www.example.org/B" schemaLocation="B.xsd"/>
</schema>

Then:

xmllint --schema AB.xsd ab.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<a:someType xmlns:a="http://www.example.org/A" xmlns:b="http://www.example.org/B" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.example.org/A A.xsd                             http://www.example.org/B B.xsd">

            <b:person>
                <b:firstName>Mary</b:firstName>
                <b:lastName>Bones</b:lastName>
            </b:person>

</a:someType>
ab.xml validates

Answer 3

I quit on xmllint and used Xerces instead.

I downloaded Xerces tarball and after exploding it to some local folder I created the following validate script based on this suggestion (from web archive - original link being now dead):

#!/bin/bash
XERCES_HOME=~/software-downloads/xerces-2_11_0/
echo $XERCES_HOME
java -classpath $XERCES_HOME/xercesImpl.jar:$XERCES_HOME/xml-apis.jar:$XERCES_HOME/xercesSamples.jar sax.Counter $*

The ab.xml file is then validated, against both schemas, with the following command:

 validate -v -n -np -s -f ab.xml

Xerces is reading the schema locations from the xsi:schemaLocation element in ab.xml so they don't need to be provided in the command line invocation.