Statuses

Success

If there are no errors or ways in which the file varies from the IATI standards and guidance, then the report will show the file’s status as “Success”.

Otherwise, the file’s status will be shown as one of Critical, Error, or Warning. Validation might result in issues being discovered at multiple levels of severity: the file’s status is shown as the level of the most severe issue found.

Critical

Critical status means that the file does not validate against the XML Schema for the Activity or Organisation standard, as appropriate. The XML schema defines the field names, mandatory fields, and field formats.

Any schema validation error will result in a file having Critical status.

Critical status mean that tools that expect to make use of the data cannot do so, because it doesn’t use the expected format.

Error & Warning

Error and Warning statuses are generated by applying the IATI Standard Rulesets to the file. The Rulesets describe rules for IATI data that cannot be expressed in XML Schema, such as that certain percentages must sum to 100%.

If the rule states that a certain condition MUST be met, then failure to meet that condition results in an Error status.

If the rule states that a certain condition SHOULD be met, then failure to meet that condition results in a Warning status.

Success (with advisories)

The IATI Validator also carries out checks that go beyond the requirements of the IATI Standard in order to highlight ways in which the data can be made more useful. These are not errors, but addressing them will improve the utility of the data. If a file has no errors but does have advisories, then it will have the status “Success (with advisories)”.