Table of contents

Appendices

13 Messages

< message
   terminate= >
   <-- Content: -->
< /message>

The xsl:message instruction sends a message in a way that is dependent on the XSLT processor. The content of the xsl:message instruction is a template. The xsl:message is instantiated by instantiating the content to create an XML fragment. This XML fragment is the content of the message.

NOTE: 

An XSLT processor might implement xsl:message by popping up an alert box or by writing to a log file.

If the terminate attribute has the value yes, then the XSLT processor should terminate processing after sending the message. The default value is no.

One convenient way to do localization is to put the localized information (message text, etc.) in an XML document, which becomes an additional input file to the stylesheet. For example, suppose messages for a language L are stored in an XML file resources/L.xml in the form:

<messages>
  <message name="problem">A problem was detected.</message>
  <message name="error">An error was detected.</message>
</messages>

Then a stylesheet could use the following approach to localize messages:

<xsl:param name="lang" select="en"/>
<xsl:variable name="messages"
  select="document(concat('resources/', $lang, '.xml'))/messages"/>

<xsl:template name="localized-message">
  <xsl:param name="name"/>
  <xsl:message>
    <xsl:value-of select="$messages/message[@name=$name]"/>
  </xsl:message>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="problem">
  <xsl:call-template name="localized-message"/>
    <xsl:with-param name="name">problem</xsl:with-param>
  </xsl:call-template>
</xsl:template>