Editing and especially refactoring of XSD files is always a challenge. You have to consider many things while you are doing it e.g. (name spaces, elements prefixes, imports/includes, etc.). Editing or refactoring XSD in a text editor may turn to an endless story, where validation always reports a problem.
There is a quite new tool for Eclipse IDE, called Data Types Editor. It is a recent contribution to Eclipse WTP Incubator project http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/incubator/ . Data Types Editor brings nice refactoring features, which will keep your XSD file consistent (without validation errors). Let me show some of the refactoring features, which Data Types Editor possess.
· Convert to Global Type – this refactoring enables you to extract the contents of an element to a new Global Type, which you may use it anywhere you want.
· Convert to Anonymous Type – this refactoring enables you to make any global element to be from “anonymous” type. This means that you will be able to add other elements and attributes to the global one.
· Convert to Anonymous Type with Type Contents – this refactoring is like “Convert to Anonymous Type”, but also adds the contents from the previously referred type, to the new “anonymous” one.
I do not want to blow this blogging, so I will stop here. Hope I have made you curious about this editor, so why not trying it yourself? If you want to try “Data Types Editor”, you may get it for free from here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Service_Interface_and_Data_Types_Editors#How_To_Install
