Patent ID: 7747945

Claim:
A method for validating an insurance industry XML document according to compliance rules governing the structure and content of XML documents comprising: setting up at least one rules profile that indicates rules for validating the content of XML documents that are of a corresponding XML document type; receiving at least one XML document of the corresponding XML document type from at least one provider server; and processing each received XML document on a server computer by: using a schema validation engine to analyze the structure of a received XML document for compliance against a predetermined XML schema associated with the corresponding XML document type; determining whether the structure of the received XML document passes compliance by the schema validation engine; returning the received XML document to the associated provider server if the structure of the received XML document fails compliance; using a rules engine, if the structure of the received XML document passes compliance by the schema validation engine, to validate the content of the received XML document with the rules contained in the rules profile, the rules engine comprising a combination of a scripting language and dot notation to describe how the levels of the XML are to be traversed, so that a single expression is used to directly access the data in the document; determining whether the content of the received XML document passes compliance by the rules engine; returning the received XML document to the associated provider server if the content of the received XML document fails compliance; and forwarding the received XML document for further processing if the content and the structure of the received XML document pass compliance, as determined from both the schema validation engine and the rules engine.