Name

xs:appinfo — Information for applications.

Synopsis

<xs:appinfo
           source          = xs:anyURI
           >
           Content: ({any})*
</xs:appinfo>

May be included in: xs:annotation

Description

xs:appinfo is a container that embeds structured information that can be used by applications. Its content model is open and can accept any element from any namespace (with a lax validation; W3C XML Schema elements included here must be valid). xs:appinfo can be used to include any kind of information, such as metadata, processing directives, or even code snippets.

Its content is similar to xs:documentation (which is reserved for human-readable information), except for an xml:lang attribute (which is allowed in xs:documentation but forbidden for xs:appinfo).

Restrictions

Foreign attributes cannot be included in xs:appinfo.

The source attribute is underspecified in the Recommendation, which could lead to interoperability issues between applications relying on xs:appinfo if they use relative or shared URIs. For instance, one application may decide to use the XSLT namespace in the source attribute to indicate an XSLT snippet while another application could use the same URI to indicate a set of parameters to pass to an XSLT transformation.

Example

<xs:element name="author" type="author">
  <xs:annotation>
    <xs:appinfo xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
      <dc:creator>
        Eric van der Vlist (mailto:vdv@dyomedea.com)
      </dc:creator>
      <dc:date>
        2002-02-01
      </dc:date>
      <dc:subject>
        author,person,book
      </dc:subject>
      <dc:description>
        This element describes the author of a book.
      </dc:description>
    </xs:appinfo>
  </xs:annotation>
</xs:element>
             

<xs:element name="author" type="author">
  <xs:annotation> 
    <xs:appinfo source="saf:meta-data-item"
      xmlns:sql="http://www.extensibility.com/saf/spec/safsample/sql-map.saf"
      >
      <sql:select>
        select
        <sql:elem>
          name
        </sql:elem>
        ,
        <sql:elem>
          birthdate
        </sql:elem>
        ,
        <sql:attr>
          deathdate
        </sql:attr>
        from tbl_author
      </sql:select>
    </xs:appinfo>
  </xs:annotation>
</xs:element>
             

<xs:element name="book" type="book">
  <xs:annotation>
    <xs:appinfo xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
      <xsl:template match="book">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="title"/>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="isbn"/>
        <p>
          Authors:
        </p>
        <ul>
          <xsl:apply-templates select="author"/>
        </ul>
        <p>
          Characters:
        </p>
        <ul>
          <xsl:apply-templates select="character"/>
        </ul>
      </xsl:template>
    </xs:appinfo>
  </xs:annotation>
</xs:element>

Attributes

source

Can be used to provide a link to the source of the information when a snippet is included, or as a semantic attribute to qualify the type of information that is included.