Patent ID: 8121976

Claim:
A tangible computer storage medium having computer program instructions encoded thereon for generating a schema definition, comprising: instructions for identifying a plurality of identified data structures by scanning a source code stored in a computer readable storage medium, wherein the source code is written in a legacy computer language; instructions for selecting a nested data structure from the plurality of identified data structures; instructions for receiving a language-specific metamodel generated from the nested data structure definition written in the legacy computer language; instructions for naming and defining a first complex type schema element for the nested data structure, wherein naming and defining comprises setting a content model of the first complex type schema element to sequence; instructions for creating the schema definition by walking through the metamodel to examine each node in a plurality of nodes of the language-specific metamodel, and for each node, creating a respective schema element according to a predefined mapped relationship, wherein creating the schema definition further comprises populating a schema tree; instructions for receiving nodes, inspecting content of the nodes, and generating a corresponding part of a schema definition according to a predefined mapped relationship to produce a schema definition for the nested data structure; and instructions for serializing the schema tree after it is populated.