Contributing

We love pull requests and we want to make it as easy as possible to contribute changes.

Getting started

• Make sure you have a GitHub account .
• Maybe create a GitHub issue . Is this a comment or documentation change? Does an issue already exist? If you need an issue then describe it in as much detail as you can, e.g. step-by-step to reproduce.
• Fork the repository repository on GitHub.
• Clone your fork of the repository.
• Create a branch for your change, probably from the master branch. Please don’t work on master. Convention is for the branch name to include the issue number like so: git checkout -b gh-1234-fix-thing-x.

Making changes

• New elements should have <xs:annotation> elements attached to them to provide documentation about the element.
• You should also update the documentation for any changes.
• The revised schema should be valid XML and successfully validate against the XMLSchema standard.
• Be very mindful of making breaking changes.
• New elements should in most cases be optional as not all source systems can provide all data fields. Enforcing mandatory data can be done outside of the schema.

Submitting changes

• Sign the Contributor Licence Agreement.
• Push your changes to your fork.
• Submit a pull request .
• We’ll look at it pretty soon after it’s submitted, and we aim to respond within one week.

Getting it accepted

Here are some things you can do to make this all smoother:

• If you think it might be controversial then discuss it with us beforehand, via a GitHub issue.
• Write a good commit message ).