XSD attribute NILLABLE not working

Question

I am working on getting an xml file to validate against an XSD schema and I'm having trouble with the validations. Every time I validate I get errors saying

"Schemas validity error: Element '{http://services.website.com/ProgramResponse}Population': '' is not a valid value of the atomic type 'xs:double'."

I believe this error happens because I have a null character in that field, displayed like this:
< HarvPop>< /HarvPop>

So, to solve this I tried using the nillable="true" attribute for the elements so they will be able to be null, but still show up as empty. This seems to be the only solution, but it is not working at all. I still get the errors.

I am currently using XMLMate for my validations and I have double checked it agains several online verifiers as well. The error still persists. Any suggestions would be great.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsd:element name="Reports" type="tns:ReportsType"/>

<xsd:complexType name="ReportsType">
    <xsd:sequence>
        <xsd:element name="Report" type="tns:ReportType" maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0"/>
    </xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

<xsd:complexType name="ReportType">
    <xsd:sequence>
        <xsd:element name="Id" nillable="true"/>
        <xsd:element name="Brand" type="xsd:string"/>
        <xsd:element name="Address" type="xsd:string"/>
        <xsd:element name="City" type="xsd:string"/>
        <xsd:element name="State" type="xsd:string"/>
        <xsd:element name="ZipCode" type="xsd:string"/>
        <xsd:element name="Entry" type="tns:EntryType" maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="1"/>
    </xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

<xsd:complexType name="EntryType">
    <xsd:sequence>
        <xsd:element name="RM" nillable="true" type="xsd:double"/>
        <xsd:element name="Pop" nillable="true" type="xsd:double"/>
        <xsd:element name="Wt" nillable="true" type="xsd:double"/>
        <xsd:element name="EntryId" type="xsd:int"/>
    </xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

Answer 1

One way that I found that also fixes the problem with minimal code was to add the default="0" attribute to the XSD. This allows you to validate as a double without having to deal with nil by making nil default to a number.

Error deserialising XML document with strongly typed XSD