Working on moving data to an XML format, it was kept in Excel docs by my employer . So I'm tryin to figure out how to enforce rules for my XML. The data is pretty loopy, thus hard to enforce strictly in the XML.

Ex.

<Hardware>
<Name>y</Name>
<Interface>x</Interface>
</Hardware>

<Interface>
<Name>x</Name>
</Interface>

I know someone is going to say well really Hardware should contain Interfaces and enforce it through stricter xdt. I thought there may be logic to validate the xml files without strict format, but rather as ex. Interface x needs to exist in my schema for Hardware y.

Jonathan Strickland

I have always used xsd for schema validation, you can go to:
http://www.w3schools.com/ if you don't know it.

Don't understand your question, is interface always a
foreign key in hardware? If so, just make a new root element
that is above both interface and hardware. Then interfaces
can be within hardware, or can just be by themselves.