All I want to do is convert my schema!

I’m working on a django in which I want to store GPS track information in GPX format. The bests way to store that in django is with an XMLField. An XMLField is basically just a TextField with validation via a RELAX NG Compact schema.

There is a schema for GPX. Great! The schema is an XSD though, but that’s okay, it’s a schema for XML so it should be pretty easy to just convert that to RELAX NG compact, right?

Wrong.

I pulled out my handy dandy schema swiss army knife, Trang but was shocked to find out that while it can handle Relax NG (both verbose and compact), DTD, and an XML file as input and even XSD as an output, there was just no way that I was going to be able to coax it to read an XSD. Trang is one of those things (much like Jing that I rely on pretty heavily that hasn’t been updated in years. That scares me a bit, but I keep on using ’em.

With Trang out of the picture, I struck out with various google searches (which doesn’t happen very often). the conversion section of the RELAX NG website. The first thing that struck my eye was the Sun RELAX NG Converter. Hey, Sun’s got it all figured out. I clicked the link and was somewhat confused when I ended up at their main XML page. I scanned around and even searched the site but was unable to find any useful mention of their converter. A quick google search for sun “relax ng converter” yielded nothing but people talking about how cool it was and a bunch of confused people (just like me) wondering where they could get it.

At this point I was grasping at straws so I pulled up The Internet Archive version of the extinct Sun RELAX NG Converter page. That tipped me off to the fact that I really needed to start tracking down rngconf.jar. A google search turned up several Xdoclet and Maven cvs repositories. I grabbed a copy of the jar but it wouldn’t work without something called Sun Multi-Schema XML Validator.

That’s the phrase that pays, folks.

A search for Sun “Multi-Schema XML Validator” brought me to the java.net project page and included a prominent link to nightly builds of the multi-schema validator as well as nightly builds of rngconv. These nightly builds are a few months old, but I’m not going to pick nits at this point.

After downloading msv.zip and rngconv.zip and making sure all the jars were in the same directory I had the tools I needed to convert the XSD in hand to RELAX NG Compact. First I converted the XSD to RELAX NG Verbose with the following command: java -jar rngconv.jar gpx.xsd > gpxverbose.rng. That yielded the following RELAX NG (very) Verbose schema. Once I had that I could fall back to trusty Trang to do the rest: trang -I rng -O rnc gpxverbose.rng gpx.rng. It errored out on any(lax:##other) so I removed that bit and tried again. After a lot more work than should have been required, I had my RELAX NG Compact schema for GPX.

My experience in finding the right tools to convert XSD to RELAX NG was so absurd that I had to write it up, if only to remind myself where to look when I need to do this again in two years.