The XML Instances Generator preferences panel is opened from menu . It sets the default parameters of the Generate Sample XML
Files tool that is available on the Tools menu.
The options of the tool that generates XML instance documents based on a W3C XML Schema are
the following:
- Generate optional elements - If checked, the elements declared
optional in the schema will be generated in the XML instance.
- Generate optional attributes - If checked, the attributes declared
optional in the schema will be generated in the XML instance.
- Values of elements and attributes - Specifies what values are
generated in elements and attributes of the XML instance. It can have one of the values:
- None - no values for the generated elements and attributes
- Default - the value is the element name or attribute name
- Random - a random value
- Preferred number of repetitions - The number of repetitions for an
element that has a big value of the maxOccurs attribute.
- Maximum recursivity level - For recursive type definitions this
parameter specifies the number of levels of recursive elements inserted in the parent
element with the same name.
- Choice strategy - For choice element models
specifies what choice will be generated in the XML instance:
- First - the first choice is selected from the
choice definition and an instance of that choice is generated in
the XML instance document.
- Random - a random choice is selected from the
choice definition and an instance of that will be generated.
- Generate the other options as comments - If checked, the other
options of the choice element model (the options which are not selected)
will be generated inside an XML comment in the XML instance.
- Use incremental attribute / element names as
default - If checked, the value of an element or attribute starts with the
name of that element or attribute. For example, for an a element the
generated values are: a1, a2, a3, etc. If
not checked, the value is the name of the type of that element / attribute, for example:
string, decimal, etc.
- Maximum length - The maximum length of string
values generated for elements and attributes.
- Discard optional elements after nested
level - The optional elements that exceed the specified nested level are
discarded. This option is useful for limiting deeply nested element definitions that can
quickly result in very large XML documents.