Office 2003 XML

Modifying Word Documents

There are plenty of use cases for processing Word documents in which both the input and output are Word documents. Since XSLT is a particularly suitable tool for incrementally processing XML, it also works quite nicely for modifying Word documents. An important tool for making incremental modifications to a document is the identity transformation. Example 3-9 shows the canonical identity transformation, exactly as it appears in the XSLT recommendation itself (http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#copying).

Example 3-9. The identity transformation, identity.xsl

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   
  <xsl:template match="@*|node( )">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node( )"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
   
</xsl:stylesheet>

What is the identity transformation? Shown in Example 3-9, it’s a stylesheet with one template rule that effectively copies the source tree to the result tree unchanged. Here’s how it works. The single template rule, with its pattern @*|node( ), matches all elements, attributes, comments, text, and processing instructions in the source tree. Each time the template rule fires, a shallow copy of the node is created (using the xsl:copy element), and templates are applied to all of the node’s attributes and children. Thus, the entire source document is recursively copied, one node at a time. (This powerful template rule and variations of it also appear in Chapter 4, in Example 4-9, saveDataOnly.xsl, and ...