RE: [xsl] Progress indicator in Xalan?

["Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> How difficult will it be to code a progress indicator that 
> would show the percentage of the process when we parse and 
> transform an XML into another XML/HTML using an XSL

It's easy enough to do this for a serial process such as parsing. It's
not really possible to do it for a non-serial process such as
transformation: there is no way of predicting how much work remains to
be done. (XSLT is a Turing-complete language, therefore it's not even
possible to predict whether a transformation will ever finish).

It's possible, of course, that some heuristic might be devised that
works sufficiently often to be useful. But the transformations where you
want a progress indication are probably exactly those where the
performance is non-linear, so I think this is unlikely.

Michael Kay
Software AG
home: Michael.H.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx
work: Michael.Kay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 


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