Error while parsing metadata

[mdcarreira]

Giving the following response XML from an OAI repository:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<OAI-PMH xmlns="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/OAI-PMH.xsd">
   ...
   <ListRecords>
      <record>
         <header>
            ...
         </header>
         <metadata>
            <crossref xmlns="http://www.crossref.org/xschema/1.1" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.crossref.org/xschema/1.1 http://www.crossref.org/schema/unixref1.1.xsd">
               ...
            </crossref>
         </metadata>
      </record>
   </ListRecords>
</OAI-PMH>

We get an error if we try to parse it using XOAI.

ERROR: 'The prefix "xsi" for attribute "xsi:schemaLocation" associated with an element type "crossref" is not bound.'

From what I could deduce from reading the source code and debugging, each metadata node is parsed individually by the XOAI library. And, in that context, the xsi prefix is indeed not bound, as it is only defined in parent node OAI-PMH.

There should be a way to configure the XML reader to ignore namespace errors.

[richard-jones]

Is there any further developments on this one?

The xml serialiser we use (lxml) won't repeat namespaces, so the oai_dc element does not define the xsi namespace, since it is already represented at the top of the OAI-PMH document. While this is technically not spec compliant, it is valid XML, and it would be helpful if the XOAI library could cope with that.

See the referenced bug report for details DOAJ/doaj#2186