Modifying an xslt to be namespace agnostic

Question

I have a XSLT I've created to handle a particular xml document. However, now namespaces are being introduced in some, but not all of our documents. I'd like to use the same XSLT for these documents, however I'm having trouble modifying my stylesheet to be namespace agnostic.

It's been suggested previously to modify my xpaths to *[local-name()="ElementName"], however considering we've already made a stylesheet, this is very labor intensive.

In addition, I am aware I can set the xpath-default-namespace to the particular namespace, but as mentioned earlier, I cannot simply set it to #all or a list of possible namespaces. I'm looking for a more effective solution and have the extension functions of the Saxon processor available to me. Any ideas? Thanks.

Answer 1

Have you considered pre-processing your XML documents?

You could remove all namespaces (be aware of possible clashes) and then process it using the existing XSL transformation.

Such an approach would have the advantage that you don't have to modify your XSLT at all. It stays readable (the *[local-name()='frob'] looks so awful) and maintainable.

Answer 2

After further consultation, it seems that there simply is no easy way out of this. The XSLT must be redesigned to be namespace agnostic, or use the xpath-default-namespace attribute on the <xsl:stylesheet> element. If we wish to preserve the namespace of the incoming document but still have one stylesheet work with multiple namespaces then our templates would need to resemble the following form:

<xsl:template match="*[local-name(.)='ElementName']">
   <xsl:element name="{local-name(.)}" xmlns="http://yourURIhere">
      <xsl:value-of select="."/>
   </xsl:element>
</xsl:template/>

etc.

Answer 3

Maybe I don't understand your problem, but couldn't you just have your template(s) match both the null-namespace version and the namespaced version of the element? - Like this:

<xsl:template match="ElementName | NS:ElementName" xmlns:NS="your-namespace">
   ... output ...
</xsl:template>

(Typically the declaration of the NS prefix would be placed on the stylesheet element)

This is by far the most 'clean' version to me - I've beeen using this to have a single XSLT stylesheet process all three RSS formats (0.91, 1.0 & 2.0).

Answer 4

I found the following page to present the problem nicely, though not giving the solution:

http://www.edankert.com/defaultnamespaces.html

And I found the solution to that problem in O'Reilly "XML in a Nutshell":

http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/xml/xmlnut/ch08_10.htm