Europass XML v3.1.0

Europass XML v3.1.0

Eleni Kargioti
Published on: 17/03/2014
News

On Monday 31 March 2014, a new Europass document is planned to be launched, the Europass Cover Letter. The purpose of this document is to help individuals prepare a well-structured cover letter, which can be combined with the rest of the Europass Documents.

Similarly to the rest of the Europass Documents, the information contained in a Cover Letter is stored in the Europass XML instance accompanying the Document. For this reason the existing Europass XML Schema Definition is extended to accommodate the needs of defining a model for the Cover Letter.

The updated version is v3.1.0. Europass in general follows Semantic Versioning for all its XML artifacts, but an update in the MINOR version digit (i.e. v3.1.0 instead of v3.0.4) has been chosen this time despite that the schema remains backward compatible with the previous version, in order to illustrate the important changes in the schema. Those changes include 1) the enrichment of the schema with additional data types, specifically to model the Cover Letter set of information, 2) a breakdown of the main EuropassLearnerInformationschema EuropassLearnerInformation to various separate sub-schemata in an effort to increase flexibility and reusability.

Preview versions of the updated XML and JSON resources can already be accessed at the following URLs:

Please note that as soon as v3.1.0 is released, the latest resources will be available at the canonical URLs, namely http://interop.europass.cedefop.europa.eu/data-model/xml-resources/ and http://interop.europass.cedefop.europa.eu/data-model/json-resources/, while the v3.0.3 resources will be archived.

Backward Compatibility

Version 3.1.0 is fully backward compatible with version 3.0.3. So, existing solutions producing Europass XML schemata will only need to update the reference to the new XSD.

The same goes for the Europass RESTful API. The change of the XML does not introduce any breaking changes to existing functionality.

 

Changelog

A summary of the changes that took place with version 3.1.0 can be found below. For more detailed information you can consult the v3.1.0 XML Schema Documentation preview.

EuropassSchema.xsd

The SkillsPassportSkillsPassporrt root element is enriched to be possible to include a CoverLetter.

EuropassPrintingPreferences.xsd

The typetype attribute of the     DocumentPreferencesType     DocumentPreferencesTypemay accept now the values: ECVECV,      ELP      ELPand ECLECL.

The FieldField element has been enriched with one more optional attribute named positionposition, and also the simple type OrderNames OrderNames  is enriched with further enumeration values.

Also, the permitted date format patterns have been enriched to include text/long/suffix"text/long/suffix".

Moreover, the included schema of Europass Address Formats that defines options for the formatattribute format of the Field elementField, is updated to version 1.2.0.

EuropassLearnerInformation.xsd

The most notable change is that the contents of this schema definition have been broken down to several XSDs.

Apart from that, there are four further changes:

  1. The DocumentTypeTypeDocumentType data type is enriched to include the ECLtext "ECL".
  2. The  PersonNameType  PersonNameTypeis enriched to include an optional element TitleTitle that adheres to the newly defined type of PersonTitleLabelTypePersonTitleLabelType.
  3. The   IdentificationType   IdentificationTypehas been enriched to include an optional element Signature that adheres to the newly defined type of SingatureDataTypeSignatureDataType.
  4. AddressInfoType AddressInfoType , the data type that defines the details of a contact/postal address is enriched to include a second address line.
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