> I am in a situation now where due to the assumption that xalan:write > would be in all both versions of xalan, I have made promises I cannot > keep. > > Can you offer any ideas for a solution to this seemingly intractable > problem?
Xalan is an open-source project. If you need a feature that nobody else is working on, you can develop it yourself (or hire someone to do so) and contribute it to the project. (Or keep it as your own, or market it -- though we hope you'd want to share it with the other Xalan users, since that's how Xalan gets better.) This would a rather major extension to implement. It requires support for extension elements (which, as far as I know, Xalan-C doesn't yet handle) and a moderately deep understanding of Xalan's dataflow. But it could be done. Actually, if you wanted to tackle this I'd suggest a slight variant: start prototyping support for the "official" solution to this need which has been proposed in the XSLT 2.0 working drafts. That could be a significant contribution to the community... Alternatively: Many applications of the redirect extensions can be rewritten as several successive applications of different stylesheets to generate the different files. That's more of a hassle and less efficient, but the only thing it doesn't handle easily is situations where the filenames being written to are actually dependent upon document content. Even that can be handled if you're willing to write some wrapper code -- have a first-pass stylesheet which determines what information will need to go where and write out a directives file, then write a small front-end processor which parses that directives file and uses it to run the appropriate stylesheets. So there are ways to dig yourself out of the hole. They're going to take either time, or work, or some combination thereof.
