ceclauson wrote:
Hello, I'm a bit new to XSLT and Xalan.
I'm trying to do an example transformation from a book I have on XSLT. I've
tried it using both the command line tool and programmatically from a C++
program using the Xerces and Xalan libraries, and in both cases, the output
is simply the XSL file.
Here is the original XML file to transform, titled "people.xml":
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<people>
<person born="1912" died="1954">
<name>
<first_name>Alan</first_name>
<last_name>Turing</last_name>
</name>
<profession>computer scientist</profession>
<profession>mathematician</profession>
<profession>cryptographer</profession>
</person>
<person born="1918" died="1988">
<name>
<first_name>Richard</first_name>
<middle_initial>P</middle_initial>
<last_name>Feynman</last_name>
</name>
<profession>physicist</profession>
<hobby>playing the bongos</hobby>
</person>
</people>
Now here is the transform rule, titled "minimal.xsl":
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3c.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
<xsl:template match="person">A person</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
If I try to apply the transform to the original document with the following
command:
xalan -in people.xml -xsl minimal.xsl -out out.txt
out.txt just contains the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3c.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
version="1.0"><xsl:template match="person">A
person</xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>
Which is just the original xsl document, minus the whitespace between tags.
I've tried doing this same task programmatically and get the same results.
Also, I've tried this with a different stylesheet, and again, the general
pattern is that the output is simply the stylesheet, minus whitespace.
You've specified the XSLT namespace incorrectly. It's:
"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";
By the way, the book tells me that what I should expect as output is simply
the input with the tags stripped away, and the "person" tag replaced with
the text "A person".
Either the book is wrong, or you're not reading it correctly. The
default rules copy text nodes and attribute values to the result tree,
so those will be invoked for the root element and any of its children.
Since you have a template that matches the "person" element nodes, a
text node with the value "A person" will be copied to the result tree
for each of them. However, the children of the "person" element nodes
will not be matched, so none of their descendants are processed.
I would suggest you fix the namespace URI in the stylesheet, and try it
with the following document:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<people>textnode1<person born="1912" died="1954">
<name>
<first_name>Alan</first_name>
<last_name>Turing</last_name>
</name>
<profession>computer scientist</profession>
<profession>mathematician</profession>
<profession>cryptographer</profession>
</person>textnode2<person born="1918" died="1988">
<name>
<first_name>Richard</first_name>
<middle_initial>P</middle_initial>
<last_name>Feynman</last_name>
</name>
<profession>physicist</profession>
<hobby>playing the bongos</hobby>
</person>textnode3</people>
I've replaced the whitespace text node children of the "people" element
with "numbered" text nodes, which should give you a clearer idea of what
the processor is doing.
For general XSLT questions, I suggest you subscribe to the Mulberry
Technologies XSL list. It's a great resource and there are many very
knowledgeable people who can answer your questions.
Dave
