Re: [xsl] Filemaker XSL woes

[Chad Chelius <cchelius@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles,
Thank you so much for your reply and for taking the time to write out  
the explanation on namespaces. This clears things up greatly. I added  
the namespace declaration to my XSLT and things are now working as  
expected.


On Jul 27, 2006, at 9:28 AM, cknell@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> A namespace is indicated by the inclusion of the "xmlns=''"  
> attribute. It's purpose is to distinguish elements from one  
> another. For example, if there are two "Johns" in your school or  
> office, you would customarily distinguish them by using a surname  
> to qualify them. Thus you know that "John Smith" is different from  
> "John Jones" because one is in the "Smith namespace" while the  
> other is in the "Jones namespace".
>
> Your sample xml has such an attribute:
> xmlns="http://www.filemaker.com/fmpxmlresult";
>
> Consequently, all nodes in the document are in the "http:// 
> www.filemaker.com/fmpxmlresult" namespace.
>
> The opening tag of an XSLT stylesheet usually looks like this:
> <xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/ 
> Transform">
> or
> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/ 
> Transform">
>
> This tells the processor that all element names prefixed with  
> "xsl:" belong in the "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"; namespace.
>
> Because "http://www.filemaker.com/fmpxmlresult"; is declared without  
> a prefix, it is said to be an "anonymous namespace".
>
> Your XSLT file has to make mention of this namespace and give it an  
> alias for the stylesheet to "see" the nodes in the source document.  
> You could do this by including a namespace declaration in the  
> <xsl:stylesheet> opening tag similar to the xsl namespace declaration.
>
> Unlike personal names in the English-speaking world where the  
> "family namespace" appears after the given name, in the xml world,  
> namspaces are indicated by a prefix and a colon.
>
> What form that prefix takes is not material so long as it is within  
> the bounds of namespace naming rules and isn't the same as any  
> other prefix used in any of the documents involved in the  
> transformation. There's nothing magical about the particular  
> letters used in a prefix.
>
> So, you might change your <xsl:stylesheet> opening tag to read like  
> this:
>
> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
>   xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
>   xmlns:fmp="http://www.filemaker.com/fmpxmlresult";>
>
> Thereafter in your stylesheet, any time you want to access a node  
> from the source document, you will prefix the name with "fmp:".
>
> Thus a template to match the root element would read like this:
>
> <xsl:template match="fmp:FMPXMLRESULT">
> </xsl:template>
>
>
> --
> Charles Knell
> cknell@xxxxxxxxxx - email