XSD How To

Question

Background:

We have an application that has been in the works for over a year by a third party company and looks like we will be maintaining this in house from now on. For the most part i am very competent i can handle 99% of any issues that come up.

In this project there is an XSD file acts as a pass through to a bunch of stored procedures on a SQL Server 2005 box.

Questions:

• Can the the XSD file be generated from the database, if so how is this done?
• Are these files hard to maintain if a stored procedure is changed on the database does a new XSD file need to be generated or can it be updated manually?
• Best practices with dealing with these files?

I understand that this is a big question but i want to fully understand this before i take of the project next Tuesday. I am not sure if i will get much information out of the original developer about this.

Answer 1

They are called Strongly Typed DataSets.

Can the the XSD file be generated from the database, if so how is this done?

Yes, open it or add a new dataset to your project, open server explorer from visual studio and connect to your database. Drag'n drop your SP or table.

Are these files hard to maintain if a stored procedure is changed on the database does a new XSD file need to be generated or can it be updated manually?

Yes it need to be generated when the source changes. You can do it by deleting the related table or sp from xsd, and then adding it again.

Some visual tutorials about Strongly Typed DataSets :

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/01/15/435498.aspx

http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/020806-1.aspx