[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Merging two sets of files
Do I understand your requirements correctly -- you need to output - a new version of book.xml with associated catalog information from the drug database - standalone documents from book.xml for topics that don't have corresponding drug info - a new version of each of the 10,000 for which information can be found in book.xml (not sure about that last part -- requirements 3 and 4?) I would build two temporary documents: - a new book.xml with all associated catalog information - a new big catalog file (from all the relevant little drug files), with all associated book information and then in a second pass, cut those big documents to output the required result files as needed. One way to do two passes with Saxon is to use saxon:next-in-chain (variables are really painful to use). Hope this helps. Regards, EB 2012/4/3 Emma Burrows <Emma.Burrows@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > I'm currently using XSLT 2.0 (using Saxon 9.3 via Oxygen 12) to merge two sets of XML files together based on a third file which is a kind of lookup table. However, I'm coming across a problem when I need to effectively merge two source files into the same output file, and I need some suggestions on a change of approach. > > I have the following XML files: > > - Main document - let's call it book.xml > This contains various types of topics, including about 4000 topics related to drugs, each identified by a unique id. > > - Ancillary drug information files auto-generated from an online drug database. > These are about 10,000 little XML files, each named after the unique id of the drug information in the online catalogue. > > - An XML file - let's call it lookup.xml - that is essentially a look-up table, matching ids in book.xml to one or more drug catalogue ids, and vice versa. However, not all records in book.xml have an entry in lookup.xml. > > Now my requirement is to convert book.xml from its current proprietary format into a DITA-based specialisation, and while I'm doing that: > > 1- Output the records with no corresponding catalogue entry as standalone documents. > > 2- Merge each drug record in book.xml that has catalogue entries with the corresponding auto-generated catalogue file(s), based on lookup.xml. > > 3- If a record in book.xml has more than one catalogue id in lookup.xml, I need to copy the book.xml record into every one of the corresponding auto-generated files. > > 4- If more than one record in book.xml corresponds to one catalogue id in lookup.xml, I need to merge all the book.xml records with that same catalogue file. > > 5- Make sure the converted and merged files are referenced in the correct location in the book's hierarchy. > > I expect we'll ultimately do something more sensible like use conref rather than tamper with the auto-generated files, but merging them is my current brief as it stands. > > Point 4 is the immediate stumbling block because my solution to fulfilling points 2 and 3 was as follows: > > 1. Convert the book.xml drug record into the desired DITA format and place that in a variable. > I'm doing this based on a matched template, so this happens whenever the processor "encounters" a drug record as it travels book.xml. This ensures that I can export records with no catalogue id and keep track of where the record was in the hierarchy. > > 2. Use the lookup.xml file to find corresponding catalogue ids for that record. > > 3. For each catalogue id, open the corresponding catalogue file using document(), and result-document it to a new file with the contents of the variable inserted in the XML. > > The problem is that in step 3, I can't reopen a document that was previously created by the transform, so I can't "add" a new book.xml record to the contents of an already generated catalogue file, even by outputting a new file with a different name. > > I can see that I'll probably need a process with an intermediate step, perhaps using lookup.xml to guide the processing so I can group records with the same catalogue id. But the only trouble with that is what to do with records that don't appear in lookup.xml... > > Anyway, I hope all this is clear and I'm open to ideas. :)
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