I've got an incoming XML with a default namespace, and I've written my XSLT for it, explicitly declaring the same namespace and using its prefix in all my xpaths. Like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<IncomingXML xmlns="http://www.qa.com/blah">
<data>
<d1>data1</d1>
<d2>hello</d2>
<d3>data3</d3>
</data>
<otherdata>
<od1>otherdata1</od1>
<od2>world</od2>
<od3>otherdata3</od3>
</otherdata>
</IncomingXML>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:XXX="http://www.qa.com/blah.rdr" exclude-result-prefixes="XXX">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<GreetingsFromSpace>
<xsl:value-of select="concat(/XXX:IncomingXML/XXX:data/XXX:d2, ' ', /XXX:IncomingXML/XXX:otherdata/XXX:od2)"/>
</GreetingsFromSpace>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Now it turns out that in between QA and production, the default namespace on the incoming XML changes to "http://www.prod.com/blah". I don't want to have to maintain a separate XSLT or a second instance of my transform in a different template just for a different namespace. Is there something simple I can change in my current XSLT to handle this?


Thanks!

Changing a namespace between QA and production is a really bad decision, since it invalidates all the testing done by/in QA. But if you can't get the powers-that-be to acknowledge that, my preferred solution to this kind of problem is pipelining: write a pre-processing transformation that modifies the namespace on the document and does nothing else.

Another option is to preprocess the stylesheet to change the namespace declaration - that is, write a stylesheet to transform the stylesheet. Or even just a Perl script.

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

I was afraid of that. There was a hack in the original code I'm refactoring to remove the namespace in the incoming string before it was loaded into a document. I thought I'd do things the "right" way, but ... ultimately, it's back to removing the namespace.

Thanks for your thoughts.