No XML Document Declaration Line

heightsofdelites · October 13th, 2010, 06:27 PM

I have a problem with an xml document created with an xml style sheet generated from an xml schema. There is nothing syntactically wrong with the xml document. The problem is the receiving system has a custom written parser that is looking for the first item in the file to have the string "<WORKORDER>". Since I generated the file using a standard xslt style sheet, I needed to declare some namespaces, it looks as below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<WORKORDER xmlns="http://www.comp.com/file/94x/app"
xmlns:e="http://www.comp.com/file/94x/app"
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<WO-DATE>20101012</WO-DATE>
<WO-TIME>194142</WO-TIME>
<GFN>unisys_eod</GFN>
<FULLNAME>unisys_eod1006</FULLNAME>
<CAT-DATE>20101006</CAT-DATE>
<CAT-TIME>175541</CAT-TIME>
</WORKORDER>

Restating they want the file with no document declaration and no attributes starting as:

<WORKORDER>
...
</WORKORDER>

I found in combination with Mike Kay's XSLT P.R. book and through this site how to specify that there be no namespace attributes using "exclude-result-prefixes="xsl xsd e #default"". Thanks, both great resources.

Is there a method within XSLT to request that be no xml document declaration line?

Thanks.
Using Xalan version 1.3

heightsofdelites · October 13th, 2010, 06:47 PM

I found the solution through web searches. The method is to declare the omit-xml-declaration="yes" attribute on the xsl:output element.
Thanks for this site.

joefawcett · October 14th, 2010, 03:17 AM

My advice would be to push to have them use an XML parser, a custom one that doesn't support the spec is just wrong and fudging results to comply just propagates bad practice even, as in this case, it can be done. There's little excuse nowadays for consuming XML using string parsing techniques.

And the two results are different:

Code:

<WORKORDER xmlns=http://www.comp.com/file/94x/app />

is not the same as

Code:

<WORKORDER />

as the first WORKORDER element is in a namespace whereas the second isn't. This means that using exclude-result-prefixes shouldn't work as it won't remove an actively used namespace declaration.
I will have to experiment, I've never used the #default or #all values.