Jerry Dixon

Embeddng XML in an XSLT in .NET

I have a XSLT that needs to reference a table of data, such as states.  This data is very static, so it didn't seem to be worth the trouble to store this data in a table and pass it in as a node set.  (See one my previous posts for an example of this.)  I decided to embed this data as an XML “data island” in my XSLT and reference it via an XSLT variable.  This is pretty standard stuff, but I couldn't get it to work. 

I consulted my copy of XSLT and XPath On The Edge, by Jeni Tennison, and found that I was doing everything correctly.  It still didn't work, so what was wrong?

.NET was the problem.  In the 1.1 version of the framework, the transform method has a fourth argument, which is for a resolver.  I've always passed null (or nothing) here, and everything worked well.  When using the XSLT document() function, however, the resolver becomes important.  Without a resolver, the document function is ignored.  Examine the working code:

XSLT
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:st="http://www.mysite.com/States">
      <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" />

      <st:States>
            <st:State Code="AL" Name="Alabama"/>
            <st:State Code="MS" Name="Mississippi"/>
            <st:State Code="TN" Name="Tennessee"/>
      </st:States>

      <xsl:variable name="VisaCodes" select="document('')//st:States/st:State"/>
</xsl:stylesheet>

.NET
myTransform.Transform(myXPathDoc, myArgumentList, OutputFile, new XmlUrlResolver());