Entity Declarations

In the last section, we touched briefly upon the concept of entities. If you recall, both general and parameter entities were used like macros or aliases in XML.

Essentially, an entity allows you to create an alias to some large bit of text. Elsewhere in the document, you can refer to the large bit of text simply by referring to its alias. As you can imagine, this saves a lot for time that might otherwise be spent retyping the same text. It also means that modifications to data need only happen in one centralized locale to implement global changes.

General Entities

General entities allow you to create document-wide entities and look something like:

<!ENTITY NAME "text that you want to be 
represented by the entity">

In the real world, you might have something that looked like the following:

<!ENTITY full_name "Diego Ramirez 
Valenzuela Martinez Perez the 5th">

Entities are referenced using an

%ENTITYNAME;  

such as

<!ENTITY TAG_NAMES "NAME | EMAIL | PHONE | ADDRESS">
<!ELEMENT BUSINESS_CONTACT (%TAG_NAMES; | COMPANY_NAME)>

Make sure you remember the semi-colon. I forget this all the time :)

<!ENTITY license_agreement 
  SYSTEM "http://www.mydomain.com/license.xml">

Be careful that when defining entities, that you define them before using them. Thus, the following would be invalid because the TAG_NAMES alias is defined after it is used.

<!ELEMENT PERSONAL_CONTACT (%TAG_NAMES; | BIRTHDAY)>
<!ELEMENT BUSINESS_CONTACT (%TAG_NAMES; | COMPANY_NAME)>
<!ENTITY TAG_NAMES "NAME | EMAIL | PHONE | ADDRESS">

Parameter Entities

Parameter entities, that can be either internal or external, are only used within the DTD and look something like the following:

<!ENTITY % ALIAS "text to be aliased">

For example, you might have something like....

<!ENTITY % NAME "text that you want to be represented">

Using Parameter entities, you can shorten the declarations of other elements and attributes such as:

<!ENTITY % TAG_NAMES "NAME | EMAIL | PHONE | ADDRESS">
<!ELEMENT PERSONAL_CONTACT (%TAG_NAMES; | BIRTHDAY)>
<!ELEMENT BUSINESS_CONTACT (%TAG_NAMES; | COMPANY_NAME)>

Defining Valid Element Attributes
Introduction to XML For Web Developers | Table of Contents
Internal Versus External DTDs