Re: [xsl] Sibling axis and as="element()"

["andrew welch" <andrew.j.welch@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 7/31/06, David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Is this the case?  Do parentless trees lose their axes?
> if you aint got a parent you aint got a brother, it's just a matter of
> biology:-)
>
> If you use xsl:variable with content and no as attribute then (for xslt1
> compatibility) an implict document node is created, and any nodes
> generated are made children of that document node, so as a consequence
> of that they become siblings of each other.
>
> If you use an as attribute then the implict document node is not
> generated and the result is a sequence. In your case the sequence is of
> newly constructed, parentless nodes so they are not siblings.  In this
> case they have no siblings at all, but in other cases they could have
> siblings but not in the variable.
>
> If your input looks like
>
> <x>
> <a><b/></c/></a>
> <a><b/></c/></a>
> <a><b/></c/></a>
> </x>
>
> and your variable looks like
>
> <xsl:variable name="x"  as="element()*">
>  <xsl:sequence select="/x/a/b"/>
> </xsl:variable>
>
> then the $x is the same as if you'd have gone
>
>
> <xsl:variable name="x" select="/x/a/b"/>
>
> and (as in 1.0) you'd have a sequence of 3 b elements, and they'd all have
> siblings which are c elements which are not in the sequence (aka node
> set)  bound to the variable.

Thanks for the explanation.  Rather than have implicit document node
creation how do you go about making it explicit - what should the as
attribute be?

<xsl:variable name="foo" as="....">
 <foo/>
 <foo/>
 ....

as="document-node()" fails here.