Table of contents

Appendices

1.1 Overview

This chapter describes the optional DOM Level 3 Validation feature. This module provides Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to guide construction and editing of XML documents. Examples of such guided editing are queries like those that combine questions like "what does the schema allow me to insert/delete here" and "if I insert/delete here, will the document still be valid."

To aid users in the editing and creation of XML documents, other queries may expose different levels of details, e.g., all the possible children, those which would be valid given what precedes this point, lists of defined symbols of a given kind. Some of these queries would prompt checks and warn users if they're about to conflict with or overwrite such data.

Finally, users would like to validate an edited or newly constructed document before serializing it or passing it to other users. They may edit, come up with an invalid document, then edit again to result in a valid document. During this process, these APIs can allow the user to check the validity of the document or subtree on demand. If necessary, these APIs can also require that the document or subtree remain valid during this editing process via the DocumentEditVal.continuousValidityChecking flag.

A DOM application can use the hasFeature(feature, version) method of the DOMImplementation interface to determine with parameter values "Validation" and "3.0", respectively, whether or not these interfaces are supported by the implementation. This implementation is dependent on [DOM2Core] and the [DOMCore] DOMConfiguration interface.

This chapter focuses on the editing aspects used in the XML document editing world and usage of such information. The appendix describes in detail all the possible outcomes of the validation operations on the different node types.