RE: Conditional document merge

Hello Peter,

Peter wrote:
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I've got a more or less classic problem of merging two XML documents.  The
gotcha's in this case are as follows:

1) document A is guaranteed to contain all required nodes, and will include
some that are not needed, but the order of the nodes may be out of order.

2) document B man not contain all required nodes, if it is missing any, some
may be flagged as being mandatory in document A, others may be optional and
will not be included in the output.  Document B will have all nodes in the
required order, any missing nodes can be substituted immediately following
any previous match.  Document B will contain attributes that override any
from document A.
...
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Peter, 

I think the order / structure is the fundamental aspect of your output
document, and it seems wierd that one of your documents (A) has all the
required elements but not necessarily the order while the other (B) has the
order but not necessarily all the elements - if (B) doesn't have all the
elements, how can it have the entire order? 
If (as your example suggests) the order is implicit in the data then it
would make sense to use A as the basis of the merge, sort on this implicit
order, and use B as a kind of element-mask.

But maybe I've missed something? 
Tom Weissmann

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