Re: Appending output to multiple documents

Hi Rafael,

> Been playing a bit with Saxon and its partial implementation of the
> XSLT 1.1 draft. here. I've been wondering if there is a way for
> multiple <xsl:document/> constructions that reference the same file
> to *append* their outputs to the file instead of truncating the
> original file and replacing its contents. Useful for the case where
> I had two different templates that had to spew their output to the
> same file, in the order they were matched. Is there something in the
> standard I missed, or is this currently impossible and I would need
> to hack my XSLT processor and then propose to the W3C a mode
> attribute to <xsl:document/> that would control whether output to
> files that already exist should be appended or overwritten?

There isn't a way to do that. You could propose it to W3C, but I doubt
that they would adopt it. The way that xsl:document works is
complicated by the fact that it's designed to maintain the same kind
of basic XSLT processing model as the rest of XSLT.  This means that
the order in which things are actually processed shouldn't matter -
you're building a tree, which is then serialised, not writing to an
output sequentially.  You will be able to create the secondary output
in just the same way as you are able to create the primary output -
think of them as two completely separate processes.

Alternatively, the redirect:write extension element in Xalan does
allow you to append a document, if you open it first with
redirect:open.  So if you are desperate for that functionality, then
you could use that.

Cheers,

Jeni

---
Jeni Tennison
http://www.jenitennison.com/



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