RE: [xsl] Severe limitation of the xsl:key element with multiple source documents

Subject: RE: [xsl] Severe limitation of the xsl:key element with multiple source documents
From: "Michael Kay" <michael.h.kay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2002 09:05:23 -0000
You don't need to define which document a key applies to: it applies
automatically to every document.

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
> [mailto:owner-xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of 
> Jerome Louvel
> Sent: 11 December 2002 00:20
> To: 'xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'
> Cc: Yuri de Wit
> Subject: [xsl] Severe limitation of the xsl:key element with 
> multiple source documents
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> We use XSLT to process multiple source documents and generate 
> one result document. Therefore we decided to exclusively use 
> the document() XPath in front of all our XPath expressions to 
> address the right source document. Also, all our source 
> documents are equal "citizens", so we decided to pass an 
> empty "main" document to Xalan.
> 
> But now we need to define XSLT keys in our source documents 
> so we tried to use the following declaration: <xsl:key 
> name="key_1" match="document('id:042C5210')/codesTable/entry/value"
> use="../code" />
> 
> And we discovered that Xalan rejects this because of the 
> presence of the
> document() function call.
> After checking the spec we discovered that the "match" 
> attribute of the xsl:key element must be a pattern 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#NT-Pattern) and not an expression
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#NT-Expr).

This prevents us from declaring any keys in our case which we find to be
a severe limitation in XSLT 1.0. So we checked latest XSLT 2.0 working
draft and found that the same constraint.

Are we missing something? 
Is there any other way to define key from multiple source documents?

Many thanks for your help,
Jerome.


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