Open an XML document with an XSL?

vb89 · December 7th, 2009, 03:56 PM

So I currently have an XSL which is parsed against a file called test.xml. Within the XSL I have a variable which selects a value from a different xml called creation_YYYY.xml (yyyy = year). Since the YYYY value of the creation file changes every year I can't hardcode a value within the XSL, so I use the year value found in the test.xml (which may or may not match the value of the creation xml). So the issue that i am having is that if the YYYY doesn't match the year value in the test.xml then the XSL crashes. So...

I have the following two XML's.
- test.xml
- creation_2010.xml (YYYY= 2010)

The year value in test.xml is 2009, so clearly the YYYY of the creation xml does not match, and the xsl currently doesn't run. What I want to do is something like: if year value in test.xml does not match creation_YYYY.xml then don't open the document(like an exception handler) and continue processing the rest of the code in the xsl.

Here is a snippet of the strucutre of test.xml

Code:

<xml file>
  <date month="12" date="07"/>
  <season year="2009"/>
   etc...
</xml file>

In my XSL(which i parse against test.xml) I have the following code:

Code:

<xsl:variable name="YYYY" select="//season/@season"/>
<xsl:variable name="xmlTest" select="document(concat('Creation_', $YYYY, '.XML'))"/>

So I just wanted to know if there is some way of doing an exception on the xmlTest varaible if it does not exist.

mhkay · December 7th, 2009, 04:19 PM

In XSLT 1.0 it's left up to the processor to decide what happens if you call document() with a URI that can't be found. Some processors give you options on this, others take the default action which is a fatal error. There's no way of catching this error.

XSLT 2.0 has a function doc-available() which allows you to test whether a document exists before opening it.

vb89 · December 7th, 2009, 04:29 PM

Yeah, unfortunately i'm using XSLT 1.0 so the processor currently crashes. Is there possibly a way of putting the document() inside an xsl:if or something of that nature?

mhkay · December 7th, 2009, 04:41 PM

If your processor allows you to write extension functions (e.g in Java or Javascript) then you could solve the problem that way, by writing a function that tests for the existence of the file.