Re: [xsl] Testing with MSXML 3.0 or MSXML 6.0 (WAS: XSL 2.0 and .NET and VB)

[Abel Braaksma <abel.online@xxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Koberg wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-07-02 at 09:08 -0600, M. David Peterson wrote:
>   
> > On Mon, 02 Jul 2007 06:47:26 -0600, Manfred Staudinger  
> > <manfred.staudinger@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >     
> > > The other consideration was, should I upgrade to MSXML6 ? Sure I should,
> > > but when ? Would this mean to lose the ability to test with MSXML3 ?
> > > You see, many question marks, few if any answers (from MS).
> > >       
> > Just noticed that the source for the msxsl.exe utility is now available >  
> > http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2FB55371-C94E-4373-B0E9-DB4816552E41&displaylang=en
> >
> > Not sure if this will be of any help, but never noticed the source was  
> > available before now.  Something new?  Well, regardless, this should be  
> > easy enough to hack into specifying which version of MSXML to use during  
> > the transformation.
> >     
>
> How about:
>
> var versions = ["Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0", "Msxml2.DOMDocument.5.0",
> "Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0", "Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0", ,
> "MSXML2.DOMDocument", "MSXML.DOMDocument", "Microsoft.XMLDOM"];
>
> for (var i=0; i < versions.length; i++) {
>   try {
>     new ActiveXObject(versions[i]);
>     alert("Using: " + versions[i]);
>     break;
>   } catch (e) {}
> }

This is a way to specify by code the object with the highest version 
number. As from my earlier post, Microsoft strongly discourages to use 
anything else but version 6.0 or version 3.0. Specifying 
"MSXML2.DOMDocument" will result in the same object instantiated as when 
specifying "MSXML2.DOMDocument.3.0", meaning those are redundant. 
ProgIDs not starting with MSXML2 (i.e., very old versions), are disabled 
in the browser as a result of security problems.

But this code will not show you what the default is on your system 
(which is the one chosen when using a PI). MD already showed how to 
determine that. Changing the default can only be done on the client 
machine by changing some parameters in the registry. It's been a long 
time that I changed ProgID related parameters by hand, I don't remember 
off hand how that was done, but it shouldn't be too hard.

About the "default". If I understand the referred blog entry correctly, 
the default is used when you don't instantiate the object by code (i.e., 
with a PI the default will be chosen, which is MSXML6 in the case of IE7 
on Vista, the rest MSXML3). When you do instantiate the object by 
javascript code, there is no way (unless when you have access to the 
local system) to determine what actually *is* the default, because when 
you specify the activex object without version in the progid, in all 
cases, MSXML3 is chosen and not necessarily the default on your system.

I got this information from microsoft and msdn, and I did not verify 
every bit of it myself. I used to use MSXML6 myself, but there are 
security restrictions that are hard or uneasy to work around (and too 
insensible if you ask me), so some time last year I refactored 
everything back to MSXML3 (rule of lowest common divisor ;)

Cheers,
-- Abel