howto test document exists

folklayer · October 17th, 2005, 05:57 PM

Is there a function can be used in xsl:if to test document exists?

The following xsl failed in IE

<xsl:if test="document('xyz.xml')">
document exists
</xsl:if>

rushman · October 19th, 2005, 01:11 PM

Hello!

Well I tried this and it works... Are you sure the document is really there?

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
   <head/>
   <body>
    <h1>
    <xsl:choose>
     <xsl:when test="boolean(document('xyz.xml'))">
      <xsl:text>doc exists</xsl:text>
     </xsl:when>
     <xsl:otherwise>
      <xsl:text>doc doesn't exists</xsl:text>
     </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
    </h1>
   </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Rushman

Dijkstra's law on Programming and Inertia:

If you don't know what your program is supposed to do, don't try to write it.

mhkay · October 19th, 2005, 05:56 PM

Unfortunately you can't rely on this working: failure to access a document is a "recoverable error" so different processors will do different things (and it may depend on the kind of error, e.g. on-existent document versus bad XML content).

2.0 has a doc-available() function but the only ways to do it in 1.0 are processor-specific

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference