How to conditionally specify an XML schema type with XSLT and Saxon

Question

Im using this merge.xslt script to merge several different XML files into one. This tool is very useful and includes a dontmerge command-line parameter so that certain XML elements wont be merged. The problem is that only one XML element can be specified, and I need to be able to specify multiple XML elements that shouldnt be merged. I could just add more command-line parameters to the script, like dontmerge2, dontmerge3, etc but this isnt an elegant solution.

While studying the particular XML elements that should not be merged, I realized that they are all of the same XML schema type, as follows:

<xs:element name="doCliCommand" type="cliParametersT">
</xs:element>
<xs:element name="undoCliCommand" type="cliParametersT">
</xs:element>

So, instead of using dontmerge for both doCliCommand and undoCliCommand, I would like to be able to do something like dontmergetype=cliParametersT

The relevant part of the merge.xslt is the following:

  <xslt:param name="dontmerge" />
  ...
  <xslt:when test="$type1='element' and $type2='element' and
                   local-name($node1)=local-name($node2) and
                   namespace-uri($node1)=namespace-uri($node2) and
                   name($node1)!=$dontmerge and name($node2)!=$dontmerge">

So here is the question: How do I modify this particular xslt test condition to be able to test for the XML schema type? I havent found any appropriate XPath, XQuery, or XSLT functions to get the schema type.

There is a somewhat related question where they mention that this cant be done unless using Saxon extensions. Im using SaxonHE9-5-1-3J.

Answer 1

With a schema-aware XSLT 2.0 processor such as Saxon-EE, you can write

<xsl:when test=". instance of element(*, cliParametersT)">

You need to make sure that the schema is imported into the stylesheet using xsl:import-schema, and you need to make sure that the source document is actually validated against the schema (with Saxon, use -val:strict on the command line).