AuditfileValidator is an Excel addin that validates the most common auditfile formats and versions (XAF, XAS, XAA, SAF-T, etc) against their schema, and presents an overview of the most important properties of the auditfile.
It is a good practice to validate an Xml auditfile before you start analyzing it. Validating means that your auditfile is checked against it’s schema, which is basically a set of rules that defines the auditfile. There are several tools you can use to validate auditfiles, like Notepad++, XML-Notepad, Altova XMLSpy, and Microsoft Visual Studio. Now you can also validate any auditfile from within Excel by running the add-in AuditfileValidator.
Step 1: run the add-in
After downloading the Excel file you can simply run it by double clicking the file in Explorer; alternatively you can install the add-in permanently by copying it to your Excel add-in directory and activate it. After installing you find a Validate auditfile button in the Add-ins tab in Excel’s ribbon:
Clicking the button opens the standard Open file dialog, from which you can navigate to and select your auditfile. AuditfileValidator creates a new workbook and starts reading the selected file, showing progress in Excel’s statusbar:
Validating is a two-step process. In the first pass AuditfileValidator verifies that the file is well formed xml. In the second pass the add-in will validate the xml against the schema and collects some key properties of the auditfile. For example, the report of the file SAF-T-OECD-v2.00_Maximal.xml that you can download here and was created by Visual Studio looks like this:
Validation errors
The Toro Rosso demo file XAF32 ExactOnline_V32_2016 RGS.xaf (see my post XAF Explorer for Power BIluxury replica watches) is an example of an invalid file, it’s report looks like this:
The details of the validation errors can be found on the Errors sheet:
In this case the errors are all constraint violations, which are easy to resolve or which probably can be ignored (however, you might argue that the constraint is wrong, the XAF schema should allow negative values).
Supported namespaces
The sheet Namespaces gives an overview of all supported namespaces and versions:
The xsd-schema files for these namespaces are part of the AuditfileValidator.xlam file.
If you ask AuditfileValidator to validate an xml-file with unknown namespace the add-in will report the following error message:
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