Re: Understanding Identity Transformations

> Is the nature of identifty transformations recursive?  

The template that you posted copies the current node and then applies
templates to its child nodes. So unless you supply some other templates
the same template will match the child nodes, and the process will
recurse.

> How does the engine know that eventually the recursive call is going
> to run out?

Since you are recursing along the child axis, you can not recurse more
times than the deepest nesting of elements within the XML file.
This is always finite (and typically rather small).

If for example instead you included . or .. in your apply templates call
then you would recuse indefinite;y as you'd keep seeing the samenodes
again.

> I'm affraid that my select on an element who's value is
> '1234' is going to mess up the results.

sorry I can't understand this description at all.
Make a small (10 line) input file and say what output you want to get
and what rule you want to implement that is different from the identity
transform. 

David



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