Chapter 6 Building an Executable BPM: Working with Service Description Objects

Managing XML Namespaces (Executable BPM)

An XML namespace is a collection of names, identified by a URI reference, which are used in XML documents as element types and attribute names. Namespaces enable you to mix, in one XML document, element (and sometimes attribute) names from more than one XML vocabulary.

You have to declare a namespace to define which vocabulary an element name comes from using the following syntax:

xmlns:prefix="namespaceURI"

Where:

xmlns indicates it is an XML namespace declaration
:prefix is optional, you have to use it when you need to make the same namespace reference several times. If you include it, all element names in the document from the indicated namespace must be prefixed with these characters, followed by a colon
namespaceURI is required. It uniquely identifies a namespace in the document and perhaps in others

You can define a list of namespaces for each service provider and XSD document in your model.

XML namespace properties

In the XML namespace tab of an executable process or a XSD document, you have to define the following properties:

Prefix: Name of the prefix that must appear before a colon in an XML namespace. For example:

<SL:slideshow xmlns:SL='http:/www.example.com/slideshow'
...
</SL:slideshow>

In this example, SL is used as a prefix that can be used to qualify the current element name and any element within it.

URI: contains an URL
Comment: for additional information about the namespace

The namespace collection of a service provider gathers all namespaces declared in the service provider, either imported namespaces from the WSDL file, or user-defined namespaces.

The namespace collection of an XSD document gathers all namespaces declared in the data schema contained in the XSD document.

You can use the list of namespaces to associate new namespaces with a service provider or an XSD document.