How to convert xsd to human readable documentation? [closed]

We have a few XML based interfaces that is quite well documented in XSD schemas. The interfaces are now going to be publicly available and we would like to create reference documentation for them.

Is there a tool that can automatically convert XSD files into some more readable format?

Solution 1:

xs3p might do what you want (see also their SourceForce page).

Solution 2:

Insert this at the top of the XSD

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="xs3p.xsl"?>

Then you can directly view the XSD file using a web-browser. The web browser does the conversion to HTML using the specified XSLT.

You don't need an XSL processor, but stylesheets like xs3p won't generate links using this approach. I use the Firefox web-browser, IE8 seems useless for this.

I've tried these xsl stylesheets: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xs3p/files/xs3p-1.1.3.zip/download http://crism.maden.org/consulting/pub/xsl/xsd2html.xsl

I think I prefer xs3p.

Solution 3:

oXygen has very nice XSD schema documentation tool that allows for easy customization through options and additional CSS files.

I haven't used it before, but FlexDoc/XML is an XML documentation tool with an XSD documentation component called XSDDoc that looks interesting.

Of course, as pointed out in on of the other answers, XSD is just an XML file so a custom XSLT could be written to generate any documentation output you like.