Generating XSLT with XSLT

stonis · March 20th, 2008, 12:52 AM

I want to generate XSLT with XSLT, but the problem is that then during transformation ugly attribute xmlns:xsl="" and new XSLT file is not valid.
Is it possible to generate XSLT using XSLT or it is beyond XSLT capabilities to produce valid XML if target schema is XSL?

Example input xsl:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xslt:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xslt="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >
    <xslt:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes" standalone="yes"/>
    <xslt:template match="/">
        <xslt:copy>
            <xslt:copy-of select="@*"/>
            <xslt:apply-templates/>
        </xslt:copy>
    </xslt:template>
    <xslt:template name="span" match="span">
        <xsl:copy-of>
            <xslt:attribute name="select">//tr[td[1]/p='<xslt:value-of select="current()/@id" />']/td[2]/p/span</xslt:attribute>
        </xsl:copy-of>
    </xslt:template>
    <xslt:template name="span2" match="*[name()!='span']">
        <xslt:copy>
            <xslt:copy-of select="@*"/>
            <xslt:apply-templates/>
        </xslt:copy>
    </xslt:template>
</xslt:stylesheet>

Input xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <html>
            <body>
                [list]
                    <li><span id="87"> </span></li>
                    <li><span id="92"> </span></li>
                </ul>
            </body>
        </html>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Output xsl:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="2.0">
    <xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <html>
            <body>
                [list]
                    <li>
<xsl:copy-of xmlns:xsl="" select="//tr[td[1]/p='87']/td[2]/p/span"/>
</li>
                    <li>
<xsl:copy-of xmlns:xsl="" select="//tr[td[1]/p='92']/td[2]/p/span"/>
</li>
                </ul>
            </body>
        </html>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

I tried many combinations of namespaces nothing helps.

As you do understand operating system and processor are not important (they all produce the same results).

mhkay · March 20th, 2008, 04:00 AM

Yes, you can generate XSLT using XSLT. There's a special feature you can use to get round your problem called xsl:namespace-alias. You'll find information about it, and an example, here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#element-namespace-alias

This is XSLT 2.0 but it hasn't changed very much since 1.0.

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

stonis · March 25th, 2008, 01:07 AM

Thanks for the info. I spent all day trying to solve it. I hope this will work.

stonis · April 1st, 2008, 08:17 PM

I tried it. It works! Excellent and simple solution. Thanks again.