XML Instance Template

Based on the XML Schema and CSS file Oxygen XML Editor can help the content author in loading, editing, and validating the test reports. An XML file template must be created as a kind of skeleton that the users can use as a starting point for creating new test reports. The template must be generic enough and reference the XML Schema file and the CSS stylesheet.

This is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="test_report.css"?>
<report xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
  xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="test_report.xsd">
  <title>Automated test report</title>
  <description>
    <line>This is the report of the test automatically ran.
      Each test suite is ran at 20:00h each day.
      Please <important>check</important> the failed ones!</line>
  </description>
  <results>
    <entry>
      <test_name>Database connection test</test_name>
      <passed>true</passed>
    </entry>
    <entry>
      <test_name>XSLT Transformation test</test_name>
      <passed>true</passed>
    </entry>
    <entry>
      <test_name>DTD validation test</test_name>
      <passed>false</passed>
    </entry>
  </results>
</report>

The processing instruction xml-stylesheet associates the CSS stylesheet to the XML file. The href pseudo attribute contains the URI reference to the stylesheet file. In our case the CSS is in the same directory as the XML file.

The next step is to place the XSD file and the CSS file on a web server and modify the template to use the HTTP URLs, like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" 
        href="http://www.mysite.com/reports/test_report.css"?>
<report xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
        xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation=
        "http://www.mysite.com/reports/test_report.xsd">
    <title>Test report title</title>
    <description>
.......

If you want to share the files with other team members, you could create an archive containing the test_report.xml, test_report.css, and test_report.xsd and send it to the other users.