Complete and reusable description of message structural constraints in web service interfaces

Existing specifications for describing message structure as a part of web service description do not support use case-specific definition of structural constraints. We propose a solution to describe a complete set of structural constraints for a particular business object in all its use cases. To implement our solution we use XML Schema (XSD), de facto standard for description of web service message structure. We propose XSD extensions that realize two distinct and complementary approaches. Measurements have shown that by using our extensions the average complexity of real world schemas (XSD documents) comparing to expressional equivalent alternatives is smaller by ~ 29%.

► Description of web service messages, as used today limits reuse or hinders flexibility.
► Use case-specific message constraint definition that we propose, solves this problem.
► Our XML Schema extensions enable complete and reusable description of structural constraints.
► We provide the use case centric approach and the element centric approach.
► With our extensions, average complexity of sampled XML Schemas decreased by ~ 29%.