Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Calling Non-XSLT Procedures

This last section of the chapter deals with a feature that many EDI translators have: giving the user an option to call their own routines. These are known by various names such as user exits, escape routines, and user functions. In XSLT this feature is referred to as an extension function. The exact method for supporting extension functions isn't standard among all XSLT processors, so you can expect that there are variations. In this section I'll present a simple example of one way it can be done with Xalan, and I'll briefly discuss some approaches for MSXML.

Even when just considering Xalan there are several approaches and variations for supporting extension functions. I present here a fairly simple, basic approach ...