Hi there,

Thanks for your quick reply on my previous posting on namespace.
However, I have an existing XSLT which assumes null namespace as the namespace attribute in the source XML is removed by another program before the stylesheet is run.

This stylesheet have various templates triggering specific nodes in the source XML. for example

<xsl:template match="FeePerUnitAmount">
    <xsl:for-each select="/CBAEnvelope/CBABatchHeader/CBAFinancialSegment/ValueItem/RelatedEntityRef[@RelatedID = $valueID]">
        <xsl:if test="not($relatedID = preceding-sibling::RelatedEntityRef/@RelatedID)">
            <xsl:for-each select="ancestor::ValueItem//RelatedEntityRef[@RelatedID = $relatedID]">
                <xsl:apply-templates select="@*"/>
            </xsl:for-each>

            <xsl:for-each select="ancestor::ValueItem//RelatedEntityRef[@RelatedID = $relatedID]">

                <xsl:if test="@RelatedEntity">
                    <Trust>
                        <xsl:attribute name="TrustID"><xsl:value-of select="@RelatedEntity"/></xsl:attribute>
                        <xsl:attribute name="PartyID"><xsl:value-of select="$relatedID"/></xsl:attribute>
                    </Trust>
                </xsl:if>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

I wish to remove the functionality of removing the namespace attribute in another program. Basically, my stylesheet must be able to handle the source XML with the namespace included.

How would I go about modifying my existing stylesheet to accomodate the namespace? You mentioned use the local-name() but I dont see how this can be done. Do I have no choice but to prefix every element/atribute with the namespace in my stylesheet?

Thanks

In XSLT 1.0, if you wish to refer to element or attribute names that are in a namespace, then the names must be prefixed. In 2.0 you can use xpath-default-namespace to establish a default.

If you want to write a stylesheet that can handle two variants of the input documents, either with or without a namespace (this happens when dealing with RSS, for example) the best way in my view is to write a preprocessing stylesheet that converts one variant into the other, so your main stylesheet doesn't need to deal with both formats.

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