How do I require that an element has either one set of attributes or another in an XSD schema?

Posted by Eli Courtwright on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Eli Courtwright
Published on 2010-05-10T22:27:00Z Indexed on 2010/05/10 22:34 UTC
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I'm working with an XML document where a tag must either have one set of attributes or another. For example, it needs to either look like <tag foo="hello" bar="kitty" /> or <tag spam="goodbye" eggs="world" /> e.g.

<root>
    <tag foo="hello" bar="kitty" />
    <tag spam="goodbye" eggs="world" />
</root>

So I have an XSD schema where I use the xs:choice element to choose between two different attribute groups:

<xsi:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" attributeFormDefault="unqualified" elementFormDefault="qualified">
    <xs:element name="root">
        <xs:complexType>
            <xs:sequence>
                <xs:element maxOccurs="unbounded" name="tag">
                    <xs:choice>
                        <xs:complexType>
                            <xs:attribute name="foo" type="xs:string" use="required" />
                            <xs:attribute name="bar" type="xs:string" use="required" />
                        </xs:complexType>
                        <xs:complexType>
                            <xs:attribute name="spam" type="xs:string" use="required" />
                            <xs:attribute name="eggs" type="xs:string" use="required" />
                        </xs:complexType>
                    </xs:choice>
                </xs:element>
            </xs:sequence>
        </xs:complexType>
    </xs:element>
</xsi:schema>

However, when using lxml to attempt to load this schema, I get the following error:

>>> from lxml import etree  
>>> etree.XMLSchema( etree.parse("schema_choice.xsd") )
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "xmlschema.pxi", line 85, in lxml.etree.XMLSchema.__init__ (src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:118685)
lxml.etree.XMLSchemaParseError: Element '{http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema}element': The content is not valid. Expected is (annotation?, ((simpleType | complexType)?, (unique | key | keyref)*))., line 7

Since the error is with the placement of my xs:choice element, I've tried putting it in different places, but no matter what I try, I can't seem to use it to define a tag to have either one set of attributes (foo and bar) or another (spam and eggs).

Is this even possible? And if so, then what is the correct syntax?

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