Re: copy without duplicates

I have the following problem. I have a XML-file which needs to be copied as it is, except, that each element must occur only once!
...
So the input document references two more documents, which should be processed and copied to the result, too.
...
Is it possible to do this with XSLT 1.0 in one stylesheet? I have already a two-stylesheet-solution, but one stylesheet would be nicer.

T:\ftemp>type input.xml
<elements>
        <a/>
        <b/>
        <link location="extern1.xml"/>
        <c/>
        <a/>
        <link location="extern2.xml"/>
        <b/>
        <e/>
</elements>

T:\ftemp>type extern1.xml
<elements>
        <a/>
        <f/>
</elements>

T:\ftemp>type extern2.xml
<elements>
        <g/>
        <f/>
</elements>

T:\ftemp>type henning.xsl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
                version="1.0">

<xsl:template match="/">
  <elements>
    <!--collect all items to be sorted into a variable-->
    <xsl:variable name="items"
                  select="/elements/*[not(self::link)] |
                          document(/elements/link/@location)/elements/*"/>
    <!--loop through all, acting only on the first of each unique value-->
    <xsl:for-each select="$items">
      <xsl:if test="generate-id(.)=
                    generate-id($items[name(.)=name(current())])">
        <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
      </xsl:if>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </elements>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>
T:\ftemp>saxon input.xml henning.xsl
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<elements>
   <a/>
   <b/>
   <c/>
   <e/>
   <f/>
   <g/>
</elements>
T:\ftemp>

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