You should assume that the fragments will be re-ordered. As this is time-series data, each fragment should have either a beginning and ending time-stamp, and perhaps a duration. Fragment order can then be recreated as needed.  

The OASIS WS-Calendar technical committee spent several years discussing this and related issues

For a fuller conversation on this, you may want to read the WS-Calendar Platform Independent Model

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-calendar/ws-calendar-pim/v1.0/ws-calendar-pim-v1.0.html

Depending on how the data repeats, and if you plan data compression, you may want to read WS-Calendar streams as well..

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-calendar/streams/v1.0/streams-v1.0.html

tc

Hello,

I’m working on a schema where you can have N number of XML fragments of the same record R. Each fragment represents an instance of the same record R at different periods in time. The thought is that people could compare the fragments to see what has changed in the record.

These fragments have repeating elements, and I worry that parsers / writers may rewrite the fragments such that the order of their sub elements may change, making comparison difficult. Is this a valid concern, and what can I do about it?

Thanks,

John Dziurlaj

Elections Consultant

Hilton Roscoe LLC
Cell 330-714-8935 Work/Fax 234-706-6434