IMO, validation out weighs the convenience. Granted we can remove validation, then we need to do certain tasks in code, which seems counter intuitive.

May be can put choice block around property, duplicate it before and after like

Dynamic VDB xml requires sibling elements to be in a certain order ------------------------------------------------------------------ Key: TEIID-2729 URL: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/TEIID-2729 Project: Teiid Issue Type: Enhancement Components: AdminApi Affects Versions: 8.5 Reporter: Mark Drilling Assignee: Steven Hawkins Fix For: 8.7 In my *-vdb.xml, I have a model defined per following snippet: <model name="myModel" type="PHYSICAL" visible="true"> <source name="myModel" translator-name="hive" connection-jndi-name="Hive12Src" /> <property name="trimColumnNames" value="true" /> </model> The vdb.xml failed to parse, so I moved the <property> element ahead of <source> and then it worked. I don't think element ordering should matter in this case?