[xsl] Writing out to and reading back from an XML file

[Chris Loschen <closchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi again all,

I posted this the other day, but made the mistake of burying the question 
down inside an email on
another subject. Of course, it's also a summer weekend... Nevertheless, I 
still can't figure out a
usable workaround, and I'd appreciate any insights anyone might have.

Here's the situation: I have a very large file which I need to parse piece 
by piece, so I'm looping through
<BillHeader> and <Bill> (many times) and finally <BillTrailer> elements. In 
each case, the XSLT is run
on a single <BillHeader>, <Bill>, or <BillTrailer> rather than on the 
entire XML document, which could be
several hundred megabytes. So far, so good, but as it turns out, the 
<BillTrailer> output needs to replicate
most of what's in the <BillHeader> output. The solution I'm trying to use 
is to write out the <BillHeader>
normally, but also to an XML document which can then get called back in 
when we get to the <BillTrailer>.

The file is getting written out more or less as expected, and has the good 
data, but then the later process
can't find the file again. The cause appears to be that my filesystem has 
spaces in the names (d--n that
Windows!) so the file isn't getting written out to c:\Documents and 
Settings\ etc. but to c:\Documents%20and%20Settings
etc. -- I have a complete tree built up on my C drive with all of the 
spaces replaced with %20s. Then the
later process looks in the current directory and the file isn't there.

I've tried to get the URI of the current directory as a string so I could 
then replace the spaces with %20s and
use that as the base URI of the document() function, but wasn't able to 
make that work -- here's the
code I tried:

<xsl:variable name="header"><!-- not working -->
        <!--<xsl:variable name="base">
                <xsl:variable name="uri">
                        <xsl:value-of select="document('')/invoice"/>
                </xsl:variable>
                <xsl:call-template name="translate-space">
                        <xsl:with-param name="base" 
select="string(namespace::$uri)"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name="file">
                <xsl:value-of select="concat($base,'/BillHeader.xml')"/>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:value-of select="document($file)"/>-->
</xsl:variable>

<xsl:template name="translate-space">
        <xsl:param name="base"/>
        <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="contains($base,' ')">
                        <xsl:call-template name="translate-space">
                                <xsl:with-param name="base" 
select="concat(substring-before($base,' '),'%20',substring-after($base,' '))"/>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                </xsl:when>
                <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:value-of select="$base"/>
                </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

I was getting ClassCast exceptions, probably (I'm not sure) from the place 
where I try to cast the namespace as a string
and then it still couldn't find the document. I also tried setting up a 
shortcut to the other file from the current directory but
that didn't work either -- the file still wasn't found.

So, I think I understand what's happening, but I don't have a way around it 
-- any suggestions out there? Thanks!


Yours,

Chris Loschen
closchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
781-718-3017 (cell)