I see a couple issues here. First your record element is not optional but you have dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" on it, suggesting you wanted minOccurs="0" on it, or maxOccurs="unbounded", but you didn't put that.
Same for it02 element, which probably wants minOccurs="0". Second, your records type has a sequence with postfix newline separator. Your inner sequence inside the record type *also* has postfix newline separator. This means you will have TWO newlines required at the end of your data. If you don't have two newlines, then it's going to backtrack and, while I can't construct a specific reason why it ends up giving you an error on it03, I can imagine that could happen. I suggest removing the postfix from the inner sequence so it is only infix separated, and the final newline will come from the outer sequence. Then I suggest making it02 element optional and record element optional or removing the dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" from either or both of them. Then try again. Post your results here again. You may want to turn on the trace feature. You get TONS of sometimes obscure output from trace (fixing that is on our roadmap), but often one can wade through it and spot where things go wrong. If your format has many many of these different record sub-types you will eventually want to switch away from using initiators to a choice using the dfdl:choiceDispatchKey property. But we should get what you started with working properly first. ________________________________ From: Patrick Grandjean <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, February 3, 2020 2:23 PM To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: Optional element with initiator Hi! I'm trying to create my first DFDL schema to parse a fixed column format. The format may change from one line to the other depending on the first character of the line. Some lines are optional, therefore I use minOccurs="0" and dlfl:occursCountKind="implicit". Here is the schema: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"; xmlns:dfdl="http://www.ogf.org/dfdl/dfdl-1.0/"; xmlns:ex="http://example.com"; xmlns:ama="http://www.amadeus.com"; targetNamespace="http://www.amadeus.com"; elementFormDefault="unqualified"> <xs:include schemaLocation="org/apache/daffodil/xsd/DFDLGeneralFormat.dfdl.xsd" /> <xs:include schemaLocation="IT01.dfdl.xsd" /> <xs:include schemaLocation="IT02.dfdl.xsd" /> <xs:include schemaLocation="IT03.dfdl.xsd" /> <xs:include schemaLocation="IT05.dfdl.xsd" /> <xs:annotation> <xs:appinfo source="http://www.ogf.org/dfdl/";> <dfdl:format alignment="1" alignmentUnits="bytes" encoding="ASCII" encodingErrorPolicy="replace" escapeSchemeRef="" floating="no" ignoreCase="no" initiatedContent="no" initiator="" leadingSkip="0" lengthKind="implicit" lengthUnits="bytes" outputNewLine="%LF;" representation="text" separator="" separatorSuppressionPolicy="never" sequenceKind="ordered" terminator="" textBidi="no" textPadKind="none" textStringJustification="center" textStringPadCharacter="%WSP;" textTrimKind="padChar" trailingSkip="0" truncateSpecifiedLengthString="no"/> </xs:appinfo> </xs:annotation> <xs:element name="records" type="ama:Records" /> <xs:complexType name="Records"> <xs:sequence dfdl:separator="%NL;" dfdl:separatorPosition="postfix"> <xs:element name="it01" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" type="ama:IT01" dfdl:initiator="1" dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" /> <xs:element name="record" type="ama:Record" minOccurs="1" dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> <xs:complexType name="Record"> <xs:sequence dfdl:separator="%NL;" dfdl:separatorPosition="postfix"> <xs:element name="it02" type="ama:IT02" dfdl:initiator="2" dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" /> <xs:element name="it03" minOccurs="0" type="ama:IT03" dfdl:initiator="3" dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" /> <xs:element name="it05" minOccurs="0" type="ama:IT05" dfdl:initiator="5" dfdl:occursCountKind="implicit" /> </xs:sequence> </xs:complexType> </xs:schema> A file would look like this: 1...... 2...... 5...... Elements it01 (line starting with '1') and it02 (line starting with '2') are parsed successfully. Element it03 is missing, but since it is optional it is OK. The problem is that the Daffodil raises an error saying it has not found initiator '3'. How to make the initiator optional? Patrick.
