Do you know of a Visual XML Schema Designer tool?

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Do you know of a Visual XML Schema Designer tool?

Hey

I've been looking for a visual xml schema design-tool. Do you know of a tool like this? I've found http://www.stylusstudio.com/xml%5Fschema%5Feditor.html

Are there any pitfalls I should be aware of when using these types of tools?

(I've read: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/746673/xml-schema-designer-for-visual-studio-2008)

+1 A:

There are many tools around. If you use Eclipse, it can do XSD out of the box, perhaps rather basic, but it does the job and is free.

You can use oXygen, which is excellent, has good feedback, works stand-alone and with Eclipse and supports DTD, XSD, Schematron, Relax NG Compact and Relax NG (plus much more, but I don't want this to become a commercial ad). Oh, and it's rather cheap and with a very good helpdesk and support forum.

I understand you already know Altova XML Spy. It's an expensive, huge and bloated tool with many bugs. My experience with their feedback-to-bug-reports: they usually either deny it or just don't get back at you. I've had endless trials with them about their XSLT 2.0 two years ago, and blatant bugs were just kept in their products. In short: don't bother (but unfortunately, managers love the slick presentation of XML Spy and it may be hard to convince them otherwise).

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Altova or oXygen in any way. I primarily use oXygen for XSLT 2.0 development and occasional XSD.

Abel 2009-11-18 15:12:25

I work primarily with Visual Studio 2008 and soon 2010. XMLSpy I have certainly been turned off by, and I'm wondering if it wouldn't simply be better to learn the syntax and hand-roll the schemas instead of using a designer. What are your views on this from a time-usage perspective?

CodeMonkey 2009-11-18 15:20:01

It's certainly good to at least know the syntax. I've used VS2008 for XSD (I'm a C# developer) but turned it away, it lacked possibilities and had visualisation issues. It also allowed syntax that XSD disallowed. I want to be trouble-free when designing, otherwise it costs too much time. When I encounter untrustable behavior, I quickly turn a product down. Hand-rolling is ok, but in my experience, graphical design for schemas (esp. basic ones) can be much quicker then doing the verbose syntax yourself (esp dragging objects and associations around is great).

Abel 2009-11-18 15:26:03

@CodeMonkey - that's how I typically do it anyway. The tools are good for generating pretty pictures, but it's certainly no faster creating your schema visually than it is to just write it, especially if your tool has code completion/IntelliSense.

GalacticCowboy 2009-11-18 15:32:09

+2 A:

I really like the Liquid XML Studio which comes with support for straight XML, XML Schema, XSLT and more.

What I like about them is their speed and compactness, works like a flaw, they offer a free and quite useful and powerful Community Edition, too, so you can get used to their tools on real projects and get a feel for how they work.

Highly recommended - to me, this is better and a lot more affordable than XmlSpy - but that's just my own opinion :-)

PS: I'm in no way affiliated with or employed by Liquid Technologies - just a really happy user!

marc_s 2009-11-18 15:17:45

Just adding my vote for oXygen. With a student discount it can be had for not much more than $64.

GrantRobertson 2009-12-06 16:31:54

ansaurus

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