Validate SDMX-ML against official schemas

sdmx is capable of generating XML for all kinds of SDMX components. When communicating with remote services though, only valid SDMX-ML messages can be sent. To help ensure your generated XML complies with the standard you can call validate_xml().

Validation requires having a copy of the official schema files available. To help make this easier, you can use install_schemas(), which will cache a local copy for use in validation.

Cache schema files

Installation of the schemas defaults to v2.1 format. For SDMX v3.0 you need to supply the version string.

Note

This only needs to be run once for each SDMX-ML version.

In [1]: import sdmx

In [2]: sdmx.install_schemas()
Out[2]: PosixPath('/home/docs/.cache/sdmx/2.1')

# or
In [3]: sdmx.install_schemas(version="3.0")
Out[3]: PosixPath('/home/docs/.cache/sdmx/3.0.0')

The schema files will be downloaded and placed in your local cache directory.

Validate SDMX-ML messages

Generate an SDMX-ML message, perhaps by following Generate SDMX-ML from Python objects. Once you have a file on disk that has an SDMX-ML message it can be validated by running validate_xml(). These instructions will use the samples provided by the SDMX technical working group.

>>> import sdmx
>>> sdmx.validate_xml("samples/common/common.xml")
True
>>> sdmx.validate_xml("samples/demography/demography.xml")
True

Validating SDMX v3.0 messages requires a version parameter to be supplied.

>>> sdmx.validate_xml("samples/Codelist/codelist.xml", version="3.0")

Invalid messages will return False. You will also see a log message to help in tracing the problem:

Element '{http://www.sdmx.org/resources/sdmxml/schemas/v2_1/common}Annotations': This element is not expected.
Expected is one of ( {http://www.sdmx.org/resources/sdmxml/schemas/v2_1/common}Description,
{http://www.sdmx.org/resources/sdmxml/schemas/v2_1/structure}Structure )., line 17