Hi, Peter:
Thanks for the suggestion of using ID/IDREF.
Unfortunely the source XML is generated via a generic
reader/writer that reads each cell from a Excel
spradsheet and writes to this XML, it does not have
any business logic (which is one of the design goal)
and therefore can not implement ID/IDREF easily.
Xiaocun
Yes, XML has a built-in cross-reference mechanism
which uses special
attribute types called ID and IDREF. If you modify
your DTD:
<!ELEMENT cell (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST cell column CDATA #REQUIRED
questionnaire ID #IMPLIED
question IDREF #IMPLIED>
Now you can say:
<row row="16">
<cell column="1">References Name</cell>
<cell column="2"
questionnaire="ABC123">References</cell>
<cell column="3">References Description</cell>
</row>
...<rows in between skipped for brevity>...
<row row="28">
<cell column="1"
question="ABC123">References</cell>
<cell column="2">text of Question 8<cell>
</row>
<row row="29">
<cell column="1"
question="ABC123">References</cell>
<cell column="2">text of Question 9</cell>
</row>
The ID/IDREF mechanism is one-to-many, so if I have
understood you
right, this is what you want. The advantage is that
ID/IDREF checking
is built into validating parsers, so a validation
will immediately
pick up on any IDREF attribute trying to reference a
non-existent ID
value (but it's OK to have an ID value which never
gets referenced).
The only restriction is that ID/IDREF values must be
Names (they must
begin with a letter and may not contain spaces).
///Peter
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