How to generate a schema from XSL? (Difficult)

[M Ali]

Hi,

I am in a situation where I don't have access to an xml, say
"original.xml". But I do have the schema for it and an XSLT
transformation on it that would create a new xml from "original.xml"
called "transform.xml".

What i need is the schema for the "transform.xml". I could generate
the schema from the xml if I had "transform.xml". But I don't have
access to "original.xml" so I cannot apply the transform to get
"transform.xml".

So, it boils down to being able to generate a schema from an xsl file,
where we also have the schema of the xml on which the transform will
happen but do not have the xml itself.

Has anyone ever done this? What would be the best way of doing this?

I am thinking of parsing the xsl for this, if so, can i achieve the
objective using dotnet classes?

Thanks...

Regards,
Ali

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

M Ali wrote:

I am in a situation where I don't have access to an xml, say
"original.xml". But I do have the schema for it and an XSLT
transformation on it that would create a new xml from "original.xml"
called "transform.xml".

What i need is the schema for the "transform.xml".

I don't think it's feasible. XSLT is Turning-complete language and can
transform document in any way, in many ways conditionally. Moreover
usually transformation result more depends on source XML than on
stylesheet logics.

If you have a schema for original.xml, you can generate sample
original.xml and transform it.
--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, MCP]
http://blog.tkachenko.com