Ballpark timescales please ?

Hi guys, looking for a little general guidance - any comments would be real helpful.

Our (not .NET-based) development team is working on a project to export data in XML to a (.NET-based) third-party system.

At the start of the project we were asked to provide an XML schema (.xsd) file describing our export data to a contracted-out development team so they could develop an import routine for the .NET-based system. The file format is quite straightforward and contains approx 500 attributes.

The problem is, to be honest, we didn't do a great job on the initial XML schema so we need to revisit it. The changes we need to make are:
- approx 75 attributes have incorrect maxLen values and need to be extended.
- approx 20 attributes have the wrong data type.
- approx 20 attributes need to be renamed.

We've done the work in our system and produced an updated XML schema file that now contains the correct values.

But now we need someone to apply these changes in a .NET environment and we have little .NET development knowledge in-house - so estimating how long it will take and how much it will cost us is kinda tricky. I guess this is like asking 'how long is a piece of string ?'; but if anyone with experience of this sort of change could offer any guidance (hours? days? weeks?) we'd really appreciate it.

:confused:.

I don't see where is the problem? The contracted-out development team have produced code that takes as input the .xsd file that describes the data to be imported (and the data file(s) themselves?). So if the XML schema is changed, then surely no change needs to be made to the import routine as the routine gets its definitions from the .xsd file? Just produce a new .xsd file and re-run the import routine.

As we don't work much in the .NET area we weren't sure if changing our schema would mean any re-writing of the .NET product; or whether it would just pick up the changes and work with them.
Thanks for the reply 2kaud - that sounds promising

Quote:

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Originally Posted by utahsaint

As we don't work much in the .NET area we weren't sure if changing our schema would mean any re-writing of the .NET product; or whether it would just pick up the changes and work with them.
Thanks for the reply 2kaud - that sounds promising

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Any re-writing of the .net product would depend upon how the contracted-out development team did their work. If their import program uses the .xsd file everytime its used (IMO which it should!) then things should be fine. If they used the contents of the .xsd file to hardcode things in the import program then not so fine and changes may be needed to the program.

looks like they (mostly) did it the right way :)
- tried with updated files today and only one issue found so far where (as you mention) I think someone got lazy and hard-coded a value.
But so far so good, thanks again for the guidance