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New interoperability testing library for ISO/IEC 29500 documents

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One thing implementers of Open XML often get in touch with me about is test documents. Understandably, any implementer wants to test their implementation against some corpus of test material, but so far there’s been no straightforward place to find a bunch of documents with which to test an ISO/IEC 29500 or ECMA-376 implementation.

Well, now there is. We’ve been working with the Fraunhofer Institute for the last year or so to build and stock such a library, and I'm pleased to say that this library is now live, at document-interoperability.com.

At the core of the site is a database of PresentationML, SpreadsheetML and WordprocessingML documents. Implementers can download these documents to use in their testing, and anyone with a login can upload documents to the library to allow other implementers to test with them too.

The documents are organised into a folder structure by ML, and the downloads are available to everyone. The documents are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

As well as linking to various other validation tools, the site incorporates copies of two existing validators, which implementers can use to test their own files for validity against the standard. Any files uploaded to the library are tested using these validators, and the validation results are available with the file details. Users can also vote on files, and even write comments about them.

Like any other implementer, Microsoft have an internal library of our own test documents, and over the next few weeks we'll be uploading many of those to this new public repository. I hope that, over time, this site will become a valuable resource for any implementers looking to test their Open XML applications.  If you have any comments or suggestions for parts of the site, please get in touch via the feedback form!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 07, 2011
    I've now uploaded many of our own test documents - they're grouped by product feature area, and are grouped under the "Document features" subsections of the relevant libraries for WordprocessingML, SpreadsheetML and PresentationML.