RE: Appending output to multiple documents

On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, Michael Kay wrote:

> > 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.
>
> No, that's not part of the W3C specification, and it's not part of the Saxon
> implementation. I think the xalan:redirect extension offers this capability,
> though.
>

I found that out the hard way. :)

> It's difficult to specify because it's intrinsically undefined what order
> things happen in: XSLT is not a sequential language.
>

Well, what if I used <xsl:for-each/>?  If I did something like:

<xsl:for-each select="some-xpath-expr-that-specifies-the-nodes-i-want">
  <xsl:document href="....">
    ...
  </xsl:document href>
</xsl:for-each>

I would imagine that <xsl:for-each/> would give me each node the xpath
expression would find, in the order they appeared in the document.

> I would suggest writing the output files to separate entities, and then
> bringing them together using entity references; or just rearrange the
> stylesheet logic so each output file is written by one template - that's how
> you have to organise things to produce any other chunk of output, after all.
>

Well, I've been busting my brain to figure out how this is done.  Maybe
I'm just too biased from my many years of exposure to almost nothing but
imperative programming languages! :)  Anyhow, my actual application for
this was to create an XSL stylesheet that duplicated the effects of
XML-Tangle by Jonathan Bartlett
(http://members/wri.com/johnnyb/xmltangle/).  Here, we have a DocBook XML
document with <programlisting/> sections marked with role attributes that
give the file name for the source file for output.  <programlisting/>
elements that have the same source file output are definitely possible,
and their contents should be appended to that file.  Now, if I wanted to
produce a single <xsl:document/> for every file only once, I would then
need to find all the <programlisting/> elements in the document which
produced output to the same file...  I'm not sure how this can be done.

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