XML and ADO.NET Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

Properties and methods belong to the object model. A schema consists of elements and attributes, together with the types and occurrence constraints that govern them. The vocabulary follows the document view of data rather than the object one, which is worth keeping straight when moving between the two worlds.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

Type validity means conformance to a DTD or schema, so with neither present there is nothing to conform to and the document is not-type-valid by definition. It says nothing about the document’s quality: it may still be well-formed, which is the weaker requirement that its tags be correctly nested and closed.

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

A schema is written in XML and can therefore be parsed, validated and transformed by ordinary XML tools, and validated against the schema for schemas like any other document. This is the chief practical advantage it has over a DTD, which has a syntax of its own and needs its own machinery.

Answer: A

Correct answer: SOAP

SOAP began as a way of making remote procedure calls over the internet in XML, and was then generalised into a protocol for carrying a message of any kind over any transport. That generalisation is why the acronym was abandoned: it no longer stands for simple object access, and the name is now just a name.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

XSLT is declarative, not procedural: a stylesheet is a set of rules each pairing a pattern with what to produce when it matches, and the processor decides the order in which to apply them. You describe the result you want for each kind of node rather than the steps by which to build it.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Web page display is the most important application of XML.

Display is what HTML was designed for. XML’s importance lies in separating structure, content and materialisation so that the same content can be presented in many ways and, more importantly, exchanged between systems. Its principal use is the interchange of structured data rather than the display of pages.

Answer: A

Correct answer: place the values of the columns as attributes in the resulting XML document.

FOR XML RAW produces one generic row element per row with the column values as attributes of it. FOR XML AUTO uses table names as elements, and FOR XML EXPLICIT gives complete control over the shape, letting some columns become elements and others attributes at the cost of a much more elaborate query.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

A dataset is an in-memory structure, held in the application’s own memory rather than on disk. That is what makes it useful: the application works on a disconnected copy of the data at memory speed, and reconnects only to read or to write back. It can be persisted to a file as XML, but residing on disk is not what it is.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

Display is HTML’s purpose. XML’s value is the separation of structure, content and materialisation, which makes it a vehicle for exchanging structured data between systems that share no software. Rendering a page is one thing that can be done with XML, by way of XSLT, but it is not the main reason it exists.

Answer: C

Correct answer: XSLT uses a set of procedures that specify how a document is to be programmed.

XSLT is declarative: the stylesheet is a set of rules stating what to produce when a pattern is matched, and the processor decides when to apply them. It contains no procedures and specifies no order of execution. The other three statements describe it correctly.