XSD validation clarification for Amazon MWS product feed

Question

I am looking for some clarification regarding how to read the XSD that Amazon uses to validate their XML product feed.

This is the XSD used (and the inner Product one) and these are the docs.

When I submit a basic product feed without a description or BulletPoint feed I get this error:

A value was not provided for "bullet_point1". Please provide a value for "bullet_point1". This information appears on the product detail page and helps customers evaluate products.

A value was not provided for "product_description". Please provide a value for "product_description". This information appears on the product detail page and helps customers evaluate products.

Here are the relevant XSD sections:

<xsd:element name="Description" minOccurs="0">
  <xsd:simpleType>
    <xsd:restriction base="xsd:normalizedString">
      <xsd:maxLength value="2000"/>
    </xsd:restriction>
  </xsd:simpleType>
</xsd:element>
<xsd:element name="BulletPoint" type="LongStringNotNull" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="5"/>

My understanding is that minOccurs="0" means its not required yet it clearly is. I have looked through a few other inner XSD (such as Base) for these fields in case they were overridden but did not see anything.

Is this the wrong XSD? Am I reading this wrong?

kjhughes kjhughes · Accepted Answer · 2015-11-13T17:15:38

Yes, minOccurs="0" means optional, however...

In general, applications often have additional requirements beyond those specified in the XSD of its XML input. When parameters are required only in certain circumstances, an XSD will list them as optional in the general case but then check them out-of-band wrt the XSD. (XSD 1.1 provides some additional expressiveness via xs:assertion for conditionally requiring elements/attributes, but it's not widely adopted yet.)

Note that bullet_point1 does not appear in any of the XSDs or documentation you've linked to your question. If bullet_point1 is derived from BulletPoint in the XSD, then it clearly is a downstream application that's making the additional requirement and issuing the error when it's unmet.

XSD validation clarification for Amazon MWS product feed

2 Answers