Hallo everyone,

I have two XSL templates that are declared at the start of an XML file. For example ...

<?xml-stylesheet href="repbase.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<dataroot>
... etc.

Both templates are quite complicated (including filtering functionality) and both work fine.

At the moment I am exporting the XML data file twice and forcing my export program to declare each of the XSL templates at the top of the XML file.

This works but of course is very cumbersome so what I now need to do is to get both XSL files to work with the same XML file. I know that this can be done (I have examples) but I was wondering if there is an easy method to switch? Or will I have to do a re-design and merge the two?

Most comfortable for me would be to add a button to each template so that, on demand, the user could switch from one to the other one.

Any tips on how best to do this or any pointers to userful HOWTOs would be a great help.

Many thanks,
Alan Searle.

I'm not sure what you mean by "templates" - perhaps you mean "stylesheets" - but I don't see two of anything declared in your XML file, which is in fact not well-formed, because the XML declaration must come first.

The simple answer is that if you want to use different stylesheets with the same data file on different occasions, that's fine, but you can't use the <?xml-stylesheet?> processing instruction to control it. You'll need some kind of application code, perhaps in Java or Javascript, which invokes the XSLT processor's API to transform a particular XML document with a particular stylesheet.

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