General XML Rules

Overview > Batch Upload Basics > Batch Input File Format Specifications

General XML Rules

All xml batch input files must be well formed and valid.

To be well formed:

• The file must begin with the XML declaration.

• The document must have a root element.

• All elements (tags) must have a closing tag.

• Tags are case-sensitive.

• The elements must be properly nested.

• Attribute values must be quoted.

To be valid, an XML document must conform to the rules of a DTD or schema that defines the structure of the document (for example, the order of tags, the number of tags allowed of a certain type, the type of tag content accepted, etc.).

The document type definition or schema namespace the document adheres to must be declared after the XML declaration. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <batch xmlns="http://www.kuali.org/modules/gl/collector" xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance>

The following rules apply to tags:

• A tag must not contain extra whitespace (this will be included as the value). For example:

<organizationCode> MOTR </organizationCode> needs to be formatted as: <organizationCode>MOTR</organizationCode>

• Tags should not be empty. If the field is not required, do not render the tag element. For example:

<organizationCode></organizationCode> will cause an error.

exclaim Warning: Watch out for invalid XML characters. Any character that is used in markup must be within a CDATA block if used inside a tag. A CDATA block starts with <![CDATA [and ends with ]]>. Any text inside the CDATA block will not be parsed as possible markup. Some characters that often cause problems are: &, !, <, [, and ].