<NowResolved>[MSXML v4.0 Validation issue with VB6]</NowResolved>

[daveejay]

I am experiencing a very annoying problem, which doesn't really seem to have an answer. I have an xml document: http://www.dataforce.co.uk/xml/webform.xml. . It has an external dtd: http://www.dataforce.co.uk/xml/webform.dtd..
I am trying to validate the xml against the dtd by using the following VB Code:

Dim xmlDoc As MSXML2.DOMDocument40
Dim blLoaded As Boolean
Dim xmlError As MSXML2.IXMLDOMParseError
Dim elRoot As MSXML2.IXMLDOMElement
Dim nlChildren As MSXML2.IXMLDOMNodeList

Set xmlDoc = New MSXML2.DOMDocument40
blLoaded = xmlDoc.Load("c:\webform.xml")
If blLoaded Then
Set elRoot = xmlDoc.documentElement
Set xmlError = xmlDoc.Validate
Set nlChildren = elRoot.childNodes
End If

I am stepping through this section of code and before I get to instantiating the xmlError object I run the following in the immediate window:

? xmldoc.parseError.reason

It returns:

The name of the top most element must match the name of the DOCTYPE declaration.

Then I step through till the error object is populated:

? xmlerror.reason

Validate failed because the document does not contain exactly one root node.

Why is this happening? I have validated it using:
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~richard/xml-check.html

As recommended in SAMS XML in 21 days.

Can anyone shed some light on this please?

[daveejay]

Just in case anyone is interested I have managed to solve this one, but i have still written to Microsoft to notify them of a bug with the validation:

I changed the xmlDoc.Load("c:\webform.xml") {Which does exist!} to reference the web version and it worked.

However, reverting back and then copying the DTD locally and changing the doctype declaration in the webform.xml file to reference the new file came up with the same error.

Incidentally a massive gotcha is the fact that VB even with the web based reference does not validate against the DTD as standard, I dug around ( a hell of a lot) and found that there is a property of the document -

xmlDoc.resolveExternals = True

That seems to be the only way to get it to actually use the external DTD.

Thanks

Dave