Abstract: Various technologies and techniques are disclosed that merge components on a design surface. The system receives input from a user to add components or clauses to a design surface and analyzes the components to determine if some of the components can be merged. If the system identifies components that can be merged, then the system merges the identified components to reduce the number of components present on the design surface. The system determines that some components can be merged if the components meet the same criteria, such as having components that are equivalent and that have the same number of incoming paths or the same number of outgoing paths. The system provides a visual indicator on the design surface to indicate that components are being merged. The system provides an undo feature to allow the user to undo the component merging when desired.

Abstract: A method of providing an extension mechanism to an schema editor such that custom properties may be defined for nodes within an XSD schema. The custom properties allow the schema editor to define characteristics of non-XML data within XSD schemas in a standard fashion. The XSD schemas may then be used to parse and validate instance data that is not natively in XML format, such as flat files.