eliasen - Unable to match the data in the input stream

Sunday, 14 January 2007

Unable to match the data in the input stream

I was trying to help someone in the BizTalk newsgroups, creating a flat file schema, and I ran into this very annoying error message: "Unable to match the data in the input stream.". I got the error message after having created the schema and trying to validate an instance, using VS.NET 2005.

I searched and searched...

Someone needed to set the "parser_optimization" to "complexity" - I had allready done that.
Someone else needed to set the "lookahead_depth to 0 - I had also tried that.
Someone needed to set the input type to "Native" instead of XML. Had that been my problem, I wouldn't have blogged about it - I'd be too embarassed

No, the problem was that I had created parts of the schema using the flat file wizard. It had set one of my records to have "minOccurs" = 18 and "maxOccurs" = 18 as well. Since my test instance didn't have that many records in it, I got this error message. Changing the two 18's to the default 1 solved my problem.

I hope Microsoft considers this and perhaps in future releases find a better error description :-)

In order to test it, you can just download the working schema: Exolit_FlatFileSchema.xsd (91.59 KB) and the test instance: Instance.txt (.72 KB) - it will validate. But try to change the minOccurs and maxOccures of the "Invoices"-record to "18" - and revalidate.