Understanding XSD

Question

I have been given a WSDL that contains the following definition

<xsd:element name="expireDate" type="xsd:date"></xsd:element>

When I call the Web Service, I get back

<expireDate xsi:nil="true"/>

From my ( limited ) understanding of schema/wsdl, I am maintaining that the response from the web service is not confirming to the schema definition as it is only legitimate to return xsi:nil="true" if the schema definition contains nillable="true".

So, my questions are

• is my understanding correct
• is it possible for a web service to return the nill element if the element is not populated and schema validation is not switched on.

The third party that maintains the server code insist that they have clients generated from this wsdl which work - my client fails as it cannot parse the date field.

My client is generated by cxf - the server code is generated from IBM Web Service tools wsdl2java ( apparently )

Answer 1

The instance you have shown us (using xsi:nil) is not valid against the element declaration you have shown us.

Of course it's entirely possible that there is software around that can handle this data, but that cannot be used as evidence that the data is valid.