When exporting a mapped range in Excel via an XSD schema to XML , this line
in the schema...
<xs:element name="available" type="xs:string" default="AV" /

usually results in a line like this in the XML file...
<availabley</available

but if the cell is empty, it results in just....
<available/ (NOTE: default "AV" value ignored)

This empty element causes a Java script on the server to quit, so I am
looking at all angles to prevent that. From the Excel end: am I using the
DEFAULT option correctly? What do I need to do in Excel to tell it to
actually replace blank fields with "AV"? This is for a dataset that will have
some empty values probably forever, so data validation isn't a convenient
option at all, and I'd rather not have the data entry people enter " " or
"-" into every blank cell.

Thanks for any suggestions. - Bill

I'm new here. Let's see if I can make that look better:

When exporting a mapped range in Excel via an XSD schema to XML , this line
in the schema...
\<xs:element name=\"available\" type=\"xs:string\" default=\"AV\" \

usually results in a line like this in the XML file...
\<available\y\</available\

but if the cell is empty, it results in just....
\<available/\ (NOTE: default \"AV\" value ignored)

This empty element causes a Java script on the server to quit, so I am
looking at all angles to prevent that. From the Excel end: am I using the
DEFAULT option correctly? What do I need to do in Excel to tell it to
actually replace blank fields with \"AV\"? This is for a dataset that will
have
some empty values probably forever, so data validation isn't a convenient
option at all, and I'd rather not have the data entry people enter \" \" or
\"-\" into every blank cell.

Thanks for any suggestions. - Bill

It's easy enough to map <available to a computed column that uses
=if(isblank...), so the project can proceed.

But Excel is still not doing what the XSD schema is telling it to do.

No word from Microsoft after 5 days, even after putting my credit card
on the line for 24-hour support by email.

-Bill