This is the fifth in a series of blog posts aimed at documenting the development of an XCRI-CAP 1.2 validator. The entire series can be found by visiting the validator blog post list. My aim is to post a new blog post every week until the development is complete, then at least once every month to document both the usage of the validator as well as any community-highlighted modifications or issues.
Two weeks ago I posted a link across to the in-development version of the XCRI-CAP 1.2 validator and early adopters are already using the validator to help start their feed implementations. In fact, in that time, the validator has had 105 visits from 49 unique visitors with 890 page views and an average of 8.5 pages per visit. The average time on the site is over 15 minutes per visit. Since I added more detailed logging late on Friday 24th February (3 days ago) there have been over 175 validations made using the system. I've just added even further logging which will start to get collated over the next few days. In addition to the raw metrics, two educational institutions have also contacted me with further feedback.
The great news is that, thus far, there have has only been one report that actually broke the validator (a bad XPath selector, now fixed) and one report of an incorrect XPath selector (now fixed). The feedback has also highlighted an issue in the XCRI-CAP 1.2 sample schema files (around child elements within mlo:location, if anyone is interested), an agonisingly painful typographical error on the wiki (for the Dublin Core namespace, now resolved) and also highlighted some inconsistencies in the sample XML that institutions are finding. All of these issues are fantastic and are already being worked on by relevant parties within the Course Data Programme and the XCRI Project Team. A fix has been produced for the child elements within mlo:location being reported in an incorrect namespace and this will filter around the various people involved for comment before being published.
There has also been some feedback around the error text being returned by the validator, in particular that which is returned for structural XML issues (rather than the XCRI-CAP file content). This feedback has been incredibly useful and has already resulted in some modifications being made to the validator to aid future users. In particular, additional work has been done for issues where XML elements are correctly placed in a document but are in the wrong namespace (e.g. rather than ) and also where elements are correctly placed but incorrectly capitalised (e.g. rather than ).
The in-development version of the XCRI-CAP 1.2 validator continues to be modified on a daily basis with a number of help/UI modifications being published today. Additionally there are now 212 unique unit tests as part of the open-source solution; a number which is growing day-by-day. If you have any comments about the XCRI-CAP 1.2 validator, please feel free to comment directly upon this blog post, or post within the "Using the validator" category on the XCRI forum.