#happy2022workday day-094

Happy 2022 day-094! Today’s introduction…

The 4/4 Boomerang Share-a-thon starts in under 2 hours (9am PDT), and there is one final important topic for you to be aware of…

An incorrect or missing “namespace” is a common cause of XSLT errors. What’s a “namespace” in XML?

I’d like to introduce you to “xmlns” (XML-Name-Space). The xmlns for your RaaS report XML is typically found near the top of your XSLT.

To understand How and What, let’s start with Why by reviewing some real life examples. For example, most children grow up with siblings who have different first names. When children go to school, other students might have the same first name. So, last name differentiates children who have the same first name.

Beginners to understanding data might think that full names uniquely identify people. The problem of course is that with more data, full names are less likely to be unique.

How do we solve this problem with duplicate data in general, and specifically in XML data?

In the general world of data, the duplication problem is solved with IDs, such as a person’s SSN (in the USA) or inside a system like Workday their Employee ID.

In the world of XML data, we have an extra step to consider beyond the data itself. The XML author needs to consider the names of their XML tags, such as <firstName> and <lastName>.

Let’s use a furniture store business example. It needs to names items, such as sofas, chairs, tables, etc. Thus, the software stores data as <sofa>, <chair> and <table> elements in XML data.

Businesses that use Excel can send and received data over the Internet using XML, but somebody needed to define the items.

“What’s the problem?” Businesses buy and sell sofas, chairs, and tables just as any store could sell anything.

Well, somebody defines the items that the store uses and sells, and somebody else defined the names of the XML that Excel uses, such as cells, rows and tables.

The furniture store “table” and Excel “table” have different namespaces. Microsoft defined a namespace for their Excel items (such as cells, rows and tables), and the furniture company also comes up with a namespace.

Instead of simply “table”, in XML it could be excel:table and myfurnstore:table, where the part before the colon is the xmlns.

Creating a namespace for a business is like having a last name – your children are not confused with other children at school.

How in the world does the furniture store’s owner know that their namespace will not overlap with anybody else’s namespace? The good news is that unlike people’s last names, coming up with a unique business namespace is easily resolved by using the unique domain name at the front of the namespace.

The final question is how in the world is your Workday report name unique given there are thousands of other Workday customers all writing reports.

Challenge: What makes the namespace in your RaaS report world-wide unique?