XSD Importer

Similar to ALFA ‘exporters’ generating other formats from ALFA files, ALFA ‘importers’ will perform the reverse - generate ALFA files from other schemas.

The first importer will be an XML Schema to ALFA importer. The XSD importer will convert to the equivalent ALFA data types. ALFA types are a superset of what XSD supports therefore there is no risk in loss of detail. Any XSD documentation will be imported as ALFA documentation comments.

Given XML Schema allows extensions to be defined, the importer may not be fully generic. Further development is taking place to ensure complete coverage and correctness of the translated model.

To validate the implementation with a real world usecase, a popular XML Schema model from the Financial Industry was selected - FpML 5.0. The results of the import was run through the AlfaDocs tools, to provide the following - ALFA FpML.