Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Adding and Removing Content

Some books talk about adding and removing content as if it were a significant topic. I think this orientation comes from dealing with result documents that look very similar to source documents, except for adding or subtracting a few Elements or Attributes. In our world this is almost never the case. Even if we are fortunate enough to have similar structures for the source and results trees, they will rarely if ever use the same Element and Attribute names. So, the concept of adding and removing content is somewhat foreign.

However, we do need to deal with these concepts at a very gross level. To add content to a result tree that wasn't in the source tree, we simply insert the appropriate XSLT Elements or literal result ...