This is the eighth post in a weekly series of blog posts I will be writing to document my experience in CS327E, Elements of Databases, for the Elements of Computing Program at The University of Texas at Austin.
Check out my previous week’s blog post.
Monday, March 4
Project 3 is due this week, I should be more panicked than I am, considering we still don’t have a working validated schema. I think all the groups are just kind of waiting eachother out to see who will post something to the public repo. If nothing is there by Tuesday, I’ll start my own. Who knows maybe I’ll try to get one together for the class to adopt. I like the direction our group is going, we are all agreeing on the attributes and details of the schema we want, it’s just an issue of writing the XSD now. Ugh.
Wednesday, March 6
Today was the opening of the new Computer Science building. Despite having the day off to be able to attend the festivities, I was unable to due to having to prepare for other classes. I spent the whole day locked in my apartment studying and working on project 3, particularly the XSD Schema. My group didn’t do well trying to work together on the schema, as most of my group just didn’t understand the specifics of the XSD, so as the team leader for the week I took charge and spearheaded the XSD building on the base of another group’s schema, adapting it to our group’s element attributes and characteristics and then extending it to fit some of our specific needs. Late in the day I published my XSD in an effort to get other groups to adopt the schema.
Friday, March 8
Well I submitted the project yesterday with just a few seconds to spare. I was rushing to get my group’s XML to validate against the XSD that was constantly evolving. I ended up having to go bug hunting looking for attributes that were incorrect or data types that didn’t validate. It was painstaking, but I got it done. In the end I believe that 3 or 4 other groups adopted our schema, which is exciting. I’m hoping our schema is selected for the class to move forward with. I’m still not happy with how I handled the url data type (XSD:URI) just doesn’t degrade gracefully when you are dealing with urls that have query data appended to it. I’m thinking about using regular expressions to match urls, but that’s complex as there are many cases, http, https, non-http links. Anyway, I’m now home free for Spring Break and it is time for a break!