RE: Sorting problem with Xalan 1.0.0

Subject: RE: Sorting problem with Xalan 1.0.0
From: David_Marston@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 5 Apr 2000 18:05:31 -0400
Quotes are from Justin Ludwig (justinl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx):
>Xalan requires the order attribute [on sort] value to be a literal
>string. It's a know feature; I've heard that there are no
>plans to change it to conform to the W3C spec.

I'm not sure where you would have heard that. Since Xalan is an
open-source project, it's possible for different contributors to
have their owns plans about fixing it. I think that a Lotus
person will fix it pretty soon. As far as I'm concerned, Xalan
should conform to the spec completely, and I think that all my
colleagues here at Lotus agree with that principle. But the fixes
to any non-conformance bugs could come from other people, too.

>I've heard that Xalan has some scoping issues that make it
>unable to resolve variables within a <xsl:sort> that have
>been declared outside of the enclosing <xsl:for-each>
>or<xsl:apply-templates>.

The actual bug: if you set the variable in the template that
calls apply-templates (instead of top-level), and the
apply-templates contains <xsl:sort select="$foo"..., then
foo has become de-scoped when the select needs it. Top-level
variables work, and the analogous for-each construct works.
Once again, I expect that a Lotus person will fix this
pretty soon.

Xalan is already highly conformant to the XSLT and XPath
standards. The Xalan website at xml.apache.org includes
information about known bugs.
.................David Marston
                 LotusXSL Team


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