Compound element logical properties

Property Type Meaning
Name String Specify a name for the object when you create it.

Names can consist of virtually any alphanumeric character including the letters A through Z, a through z and the digits 0 through 9.

They may also include the following punctuation characters;
  • - the hyphen
  • _ the underscore
  • . the period

Names can only start with a letter or the underscore character and not with a number, hyphen or period.

Names beginning with xml or any variant (for example XmL) are reserved by the XML standards specification.

Further details of naming conventions and allowable characters can be found in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) specification that can be found on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web site.

Namespace Enumerated type Namespaces are a simple method for qualifying element and attribute names by associating them with namespaces identified by URI references.

If <no target namespace> is displayed, a namespace has not been set for this object.

If the property is inactive, the message set has not been configured to support namespaces.

Where the property is active, namespaces that are available for selection are displayed in the drop-down list.

Nillable Check box Select this if you want the element to be able to be defined as null. This is distinct from being empty where there is no data in the element.
Abstract Check box Select this if you do not want the element to appear in the message, but require one of the members of its substitution group to appear in its place.

Value

Property Type Meaning
Default Button and String This property provides the default value for an element or attribute.

When writing a fixed-length portion of a message (CWF or fixed-length TDS) if the attribute or element is missing from the message tree, the default value is inserted into the bit stream in order to preserve the message structure.

This property is not used by the message broker when parsing.

Note that this behavior differs from the XML Schema specification.

Fixed Button and String This property provides the fixed value for an element or attribute.

If a Fixed value is set for an attribute or element and a message is received, if the attribute or element exists in the message, the data in that part of the message must match that held in this property.

If the attribute or element does not exist in the message, the broker creates it and populates it with the value in this property.

Interpret Value As Enumerated type Specify if values stored within this object must be interpreted as having significance for the parser and, if so, the type of interpretation that must occur.

The possible values for this property are:

  • None This is the default value and indicates that the element or attribute does not have any key value associated with it.
  • MessageSetIdentity. Specifies that the value of the element or attribute corresponds to the identifier, name or alias (in that priority order) that is associated with the message set where all subsequent embedded messages that are descendents of the enclosing message are defined. This value remains in force unless a new element or attribute MessageSetIdentity field is encountered which resets the MessageSetIdentity value to this new one.
  • MessageIdentity. Specifies that the value of the element or attribute corresponds to the name or alias (in that priority order) that is associated with a message and acts as an identifier for subsequent embedded messages which are the immediate children of the enclosing message. This identity applies until a new element or attribute MessageIdentity field is encountered at the same level in the tree. The embedded message may be defined in either the current message set or in a message set identified using a MessageSetIdentity.
Note: This property is only applicable when the type of the object is derived from xsd:string.

Occurrences

Property Type Meaning
Min Occurs Integer Specify the minimum number of times that the object can repeat. The default is 1.

If the value is set to 0, then the object is optional.

With the exception of Max Occurs being set to -1, if a value is set for Min Occurs, it must be less than or equal to the value in Max Occurs.

Max Occurs Integer Specify the maximum number of times that the object can repeat. The default is 1.

If this property is not set, then the object can not occur more than once.

If this property is set to 0, it is interpreted as if the object does not exist in the message.

It can also be set to -1 to indicate that the limit is unbounded and there is no maximum to the number of occurrences.

Related concepts
The message model
Related tasks
Working with message model objects
Related reference
Message model object properties
Deprecated message model object properties
Compound element properties