Working With .XSD Files...

[Jason Richmeier]

As part of the project I am working on, I received a .XSD file defining the
data layout for data that I will receive.

When I open this file in Visual Studio, I get a nice pretty picture of how
the data tables relate to one another. When a user that does not have Visual
Studio opens this file, they see the raw XML (which is not very useful to
them). I would like to export the representation that is displayed by Visual
Studio into some other format (say Visio) that will be useful to others (not
to mention the graphical representation in Visual Studio is not perfect since
it wants to autosize data tables). Does anybody know what I can do to
accomplish such a task?

Thank you,

Jason Richmeier

[Steven Cheng[MSFT]]

Hello Jason,

As for the XSD Schema file, the Visual Studio IDE will parse it through
some Schema processing API to convert the XML based schema content into
memory and render in the designer( the visual graphics you see). So far
based on my research, this rendering process is internally hidden from
users and what we can do to export the visual representation of the XSD
schema in VisualStudio is to print a screenshot of the IDE window(if all
the elements in the schena can be visible in one screen) and then save it
as an image(bmp , jpg....).

Also, most visual XSD/XML editor will only maintain the XML source content
of the XSD/XML file, the visual representation is producted by its internal
rendering engine and it is hard to persist the visual representation as a
common format(except picture/image).

BTW, if you'll deliver the XSD file to many other users and will prefer the
visual representation, I suggest you consider use an external visual XSD
editor so that you can always use it to product the consistent visual
representation of the XSD file.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any other questions or anything
we can help.
Sincerely,

Steven Cheng

Microsoft MSDN Online Support Lead

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