Parsing XML and validating XML

Environment: Oracle 9iR2 / Oracle HTTP Server / mod_plsql

Guys a little help if possible. Our app runs using pl/sql exclusively.

We wil be given an XML schema defintion and XL documents cotaining the data. The schema defitions starts like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!-- edited with XML Spy v4.4 U (http://www.xmlspy.com) by Dick Lemm
(Adnovate) -->

<!-- edited with Microsoft Development Environment by Donald Lubbers
(Hemels van der Hart) -->

<!--W3C Schema generated by XML Spy v4.4 U (http://www.xmlspy.com)--> <xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" elementFormDefault="qualified">

        <xs:element name="JOBS">
...
...

The first thing we need to do I think is validate the XML document against the XML schema definition. What procedure should we use to do that?

If we pss this phase then we want to get the data out of the XML document and feed it into the APIs we already built.

I have seen dbms_xmlsave which seems to take XML data and store it in a table - I have played with this and it seems to work for simple cases. But part of the XML schema defines data items that would sit in a child table such as... can we still use dbms_xmlsave?

If not I *think* an alternative approach is to parse the XML to retrieve the data values - which procedure would we use to do that? And would we be saying 'give me the data value that corresponds to field1'?

Finally as I understand it (which may be wrong of course!) XML schema defitiions supercede DTDs? I have seen references in Oracle manuals to DTDs but lss to schema definitions - can the oracle procedures handle both?

Really appreciate some assistance here!

Many thanks

-- 

jeremy