Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Omitting Empty Elements and Attributes

If you look back to HierarchyToFlat.xml, the desired result file for one of the examples above, you'll notice that ShipToStreet2 and ShipToCountry are empty Elements. This may be okay for some applications and schemas, but it may not be for others. These were created because in our xsl:template content we had as a literal result the start and end tags for these Elements, and the select for the xsl:value-of didn't find a match in the source tree. We can tell if we might run into a situation like this by either knowing the business data or reviewing the schema for the source document. If there's a minOccurs of zero on an Element in a sequence, then you should code to avoid creating empty Elements if you can't ...