Hi people, I could really use your help if you've ever tried using asp to do multiple xml->xml transormations using xsl.

My problem is that I wish to sort a list of tags by date using xsl, save them to a file and then to do further transformations on that new file using xsl.

The issue is that the sorted file simply can't be read by xsl properly.

After hours of trying to play with character encodings etc I have worked out that:

1. If the same text that is output is written by notepad (typed by hand) (instead of asp) new xsl transformations *do* work

2. Asp seemingly can read in a range of formats including UTF-16 and ISO-8859-1, and mix them too (different xsl encoding to xml encoding to output encoding)

a point to mention is I'm using the XMLDOM save method to save the file, but I've tried serialising it to a text file and using the newer MS2XML.Template way and everything has the same problem.

Ok, so I tried to just use firefox's output, save it to a file (paste,notepad,save) and then see if that worked, but it failed,

below is the source and procedure:

formatList.xml


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet href="testsort.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
<shows>
   <showdef date="20060420" href="format_archive/20060420.xml">format 1</showdef>
  <showdef date="20060410" href="format_archive/20060410.xml">format 2</showdef>
  <showdef date="20060415" href="format_archive/20060415.xml">format 3</showdef>

</shows>


Next the testsort.xsl

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:output encoding="ISO-8859-1" omit-xml-declaration="no"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<show>
<xsl:for-each select="shows/showdef">
<xsl:sort select="@date" order="descending"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:for-each>
</show>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>


The output I get is this: (results.xml)

<show>
<showdef date="20060420" href="format_archive/20060420.xml">format 1</showdef>
<showdef date="20060415" href="format_archive/20060415.xml">format 3</showdef>
<showdef date="20060410" href="format_archive/20060410.xml">format 2</showdef>
</show>


But if I add a stylesheet to this with this tag at the top:
<?xml-stylesheet href="testsort.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>

(the same testsort.xsl for testing purposes) I don't get sorted output as before, I just get:

<shows/>

How can this be the case when the only difference between the original formatList.xml and the results.xml is the order of the showdef tags [and maybe the character encoding??]

Any help is hugely appreciated

ben

ok so I realised that there was a descrepancy between the Shows and show tags, its fixed now...just wish there was a better way to debug xpaths that can't be matched

>just wish there was a better way to debug xpaths that can't be matched

First: don't try to use the browser as a development environment. It's the worst possible environment for debugging. Use Stylus Studio or XML Spy, or just a text editor and command line XSLT processor such as Saxon.

Second: The advanced solution is to use schema-aware transformations with XSLT 2.0. See http://www.stylusstudio.com/schema_aware.html - the idea here is that if the XSLT processor knows about the schema for your source document, then it can detect invalid paths at compile time.

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