I have a large XSD, with elements that look like this:

<xs:element name="ProgramName" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0">
  <xs:annotation>
    <xs:documentation>PN</xs:documentation> 
  </xs:annotation>
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="TestItem" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0">
  <xs:annotation>
    <xs:documentation>TA</xs:documentation> 
  </xs:annotation>
</xs:element>

I would like to collapse the <documentation> element into an attribute of the grandparent element, like this:

<xs:element name="ProgramName" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" code="PN">
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="TestItem" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" code="TA">
</xs:element>

How could this be done with XSLT? Alternatively, is there a better (read: simpler) way to do it than XSLT?

The resulting XSD will be used with XSD.EXE to create a C# class, for serialization and deserialization purposes. The original XSD cannot be used this way, because XSD.EXE drops all of the annotation elements, so the information contained in those annotations is lost.

• c#
• xslt
• serialization
• xsd

This is how I'd do it:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <xsl:output indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

  <xsl:template match="node()|@*">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="*[xs:annotation]">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:attribute name="code"><xsl:value-of select="xs:annotation/xs:documentation"/></xsl:attribute>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
    </xsl:copy>    
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="xs:annotation"/>      

</xsl:stylesheet>

This Just another answer :)

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>

    <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="node()[local-name()='element']">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()[local-name()!='annotation']"/>
      <xsl:for-each select="node()[local-name()='annotation']/node()[local-name()='documentation']">
        <xsl:attribute name="code">
          <xsl:value-of select="."/>
        </xsl:attribute>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Indeed a very good thought of using XSLT for rearranging nodes rather than doing it manually :) I always make use of XSLT ..
We can even use it to generate sample XMLs from XSD .. if XSD is with bearable size :)