Re: [xsl] Preserve HTML formatting when apply-templates in variabl

[Chris Loschen <closchen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

This raises an issue I've been struggling with as well. I've been reading this
list for several years now and have seen numerous threads about avoiding
d-o-e if at all possible. I've almost always been able to avoid it, and I've
even  rooted out as much of it as I can from the code I've corrected for
others. But I've just used it in my current project, and I'm not sure if there
was another approach I could have used.

Here's the situation: I've got a very large input file which would overflow my
memory if I ran the XSLT all at once. So instead I'm breaking up the file into
smaller pieces and running each one separately. More specifically, the file
is set up like

<!ELEMENT root (header, bill+, trailer)>

and I need to process the header, each individual bill, and finally the trailer
in a series of XSLT transforms, usually more than a thousand all told.
However, I do need to retain some of the data from the transforms as I go
because I need to include a grand total of the amount billed and the total
number of records in the trailer data.

I'm using XSLT 1 and Xalan-J.

What I've done is use xalan:write when I process the header like so:

<xalan:write file="bills.xml">
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="true">&lt;root&gt;</xsl:text>
</xalan:write>

As I process each bill, I add to that file like so:

<xalan:write file="bills.xml" append="true">
    <invoice>
         <total-records><xsl:value-of 
select="$total-records"/></total-records>
         <total-amount><xsl:value-of select="$total-amount"/></total-amount>
    </invoice>
</xalan:write>

And finally at the end I close the root element while I'm processing the 
trailer
like so:

      <xalan:write file="bills.xml" append="true">
            <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&lt;/root&gt;</xsl:text>
      </xalan:write>

I end up with a well-formed XML file which I can then read in with the 
document()
function and do the sums I need to do etc.

This is working just fine with my current setup (though it leaves a temp 
file behind, which
I haven't dealt with yet), but it strikes me as very ugly, and goes against 
all I've learned
on this list about always outputting complete nodes rather than a start tag 
in one place
and an end tag elsewhere. I haven't been able to come up with a better 
alternative though.
Does anyone have any suggestions or should I just figure it ain't broke so 
don't fix it?
Thanks!

PS -- I thank the people who replied to my messages a few days ago -- I 
sent a reply
to the list but I think it never actually made it -- I didn't have access 
to my normal email
account, and I asked Tommie to post it for me, but I never saw it -- no 
doubt Tommie needs
a vacation now and again too! I'll try to post it again as soon as I can.

At 11:35 AM 8/6/2004, you wrote:

> > Can you think of a sensible use of "disable-output-escaping"?
>
> 4 off the top of my head:
>
>
> a)
> creating almost-but-not-quite XML like some template languages
>
> <% .... %>
>
> (ASP JSP etc)
>
> As that isn't legal XML, XSLT won't generate it without a bit of from
> d-o-e.
>
> b)
> Generating a local subset of a doctype, and entity references, if you
> _really_ have to.
>
> c)
> In the MathML specification we use CDATA sections for mathml examples.
> We don't just "inline" the XML which is the usual advice as we want
> tight control over things like indentation and use of ' or " around
> attribute values. If you are telling the user that they can do a="2" or
> a='2' you don't want the system to write them both out the same way:-)
> In the normative  html version of the spec it's no problem you just
> value-of the example into a <pre> and it all works, but  in the
> XHTML+MathML version we _also_ want to inline it as XML so you get a
> side-by-side view of the literal XML and how your browser renders it,
> we use d-o-e to produce this.
>
> d) If you have quoted html inside your xml as in
>  <foo><![CDATA[ a <br> c <img src= "x.png"> jjj ]]></foo>
> and you need that html in the output. If you can fix your input not to
> do that it is good but often you can't (RSS feeds etc) and so d-o-e can
> be used as a method of last resort (although xslt2 offers alternatives,
> more on that another day perhaps:-)(
>
>
> David
>
>
>
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Yours,

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