Re: My 2 pence worth
This explains a lot.
I'm the same AC that posted 'Never work with Fujitsu if you can help it' below you.
A few years after the original HORIZON work, we had another unrelated project with the PO, and of course that involved Fujitsu again.
Fujitsu were responsible for writing up the specifications, this included a lot of custom XML formatted data this time, which originally did not include schemas (or DTDs)!
On reading the specs, it was obvious that who ever wrote them had no idea how XML should be used. It was basically just a simple list of 100s of elements, all in one large block, with dozens of XML attributes being used in most of them. A complete mess, and as mentioned, not even any DTDs or schemas'!
Due to our past experiences with them, we insisted (internally with RMG) on XML schemas being required, otherwise we should refuse to allow them to interface into our system, and used all the previous evidence of them constantly messing with, and breaking, the HORIZON interface, as the primary reason for this. Which was accepted, and so RMG insisted PO, and therefore Fujitsu provide schemas.
We also insisted that the interfaces include a data validation step, against the schemas, at both the sending (PO/Fujitsu ) and receiving ends (RMG). (They were using FTP/S, so no built in validation like you could do with say AS2, or a modern web-service). This also included sending any validation failure reports back to the sending system, where they were required to take action to fix their broken data and then resend. As such we would not raise alerts on our system, for their bad data, we simply generated the reports, logged the issue, and ignored the data. And all this was agreed.
Some months after we'd gone live, we get a report from a very irate PO representative, that no data had been processed by RMG for something like three or four weeks! And demanded to know why.
Of course I investigated, found we'd been failing data against the schema validation, and passing the reports back to Fujitsu to investigate, all logged, but silent at our end, as that was the agreed process.
Fujitsu claimed all was well at their end, and it turned out they had been ignoring the validation failure reports from us, as it was passing their validation without error!?
We confirmed the data was bad, but they insisted it was good, so we asked Fujitsu for a copy of their Schema. Sure enough it wasn't the same as ours. Same version number, but with new elements added!
Seems they'd changed the data contents, then just manually edited their schema till the data passed! Never even thought to ask us to do any changes at our end!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
