Controlling prefix sh: in SBDH xml elements

[binaradarsha]

Hi,

In Peppol world it requires SBDH documents. As in Peppol documentation examples , etc. elements don't have the prefix sh:. But if we input an Invoice to the Phase4PeppolSender.Builder the output SBDH doc is generated with prefix sh:.

So are the both ways (with and without prefix sh:) totally accepted in Peppol, and in general?
Does Phase4PeppolSender.Builder have any method to control the presence of this prefix?

[phax]

Hi, the XML namespace prefix should in realty not matter.
The namespace prefix is a "shortcut" to avoid to always write the long namespace URI in all elements.
Take this example:

<sh:StandardBusinessDocument xmlns:sh="http://www.unece.org/cefact/namespaces/StandardBusinessDocumentHeader">
...
</sh:StandardBusinessDocument>

tells the XML processor: replace the prefix sh with http://www.unece.org/cefact/namespaces/StandardBusinessDocumentHeader when reading the XML.

In memory, the relevant element representation is only the combination of namespace URI http://www.unece.org/cefact/namespaces/StandardBusinessDocumentHeader and element name StandardBusinessDocument - the prefix is irrelevant for execution.

So the above example is totally equivalent to

<hugo:StandardBusinessDocument xmlns:hugo="http://www.unece.org/cefact/namespaces/StandardBusinessDocumentHeader">
...
</hugo:StandardBusinessDocument>

And in case you want to be very brief, you fallback to the "default prefix" (the empty string), it looks like this:

<StandardBusinessDocument xmlns="http://www.unece.org/cefact/namespaces/StandardBusinessDocumentHeader">
...
</StandardBusinessDocument>

It is all the same...
So the prefix does NOT matter.

Of course you can have bad implementations that rely on a certain prefix, but that would be a processing error on their side and not XML compliant.

hth

[binaradarsha]

Thank you very much for the explanation Philip!