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RE: [xsl] How to handle dynamic XPath

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Michael Kay wrote:

You haven't given a great deal of detail about the requirements

No, I haven't. Yet the suggestions made by you and others were very
valuable. See below for some more info about what I am doing. If there
is interest I can share more particularities.

However, on the surface, I think my preferred approach here would be to
write a (meta)stylesheet that takes the schema as input and generates an
XSLT stylesheet as output. This latter stylesheet should then expand the
default values in your form.
This approach is more portable than using xx:evaluate(); it is also likely
to be more efficient, more resilient to namespace variations, and more
maintainable.

I'll investigate this possibility after I got the thing working with
saxon:evaluate(). If it not complicating the entire architecture too
much I agree with you that solution will be preferable.

The other part of your application architecture I would question is the

idea

of processing raw schema documents as your input. It's almost impossible in
practice to do this correctly - there are so many different ways that users
can write the same schema, and I bet that you end up testing your code on
only a tiny fraction of these. As an alternative, you might consider using
as input the SCM output available from the Saxon schema processor, which
gives you an XML view of the compiled schema, eliminating all these
variations.

Sure, fully agree. The schemas I can handle are limited to UN/CEFACT
NDR type schemas. The use case is to allow SMEs to easily participate
in e-business XML exchanges.

Thanks again for your responses!

Fred van Blommestein

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