XSLT, 2nd Edition

Name

document()

Allows you to process multiple source documents in a single stylesheet. This extremely powerful and flexible function is discussed extensively in Chapter 7, so we’ll only include a brief overview of the function here.

Syntax

[1.0] node-set document(object, node-set?)
[2.0] node()* document(item()*)
[2.0] node()* document(item()*, node())

Inputs

The document() function most commonly takes a string as its argument; that string is treated as a URI, and the XSLT processor attempts to open that URI and parse it. If the string is empty (the function call is document('')), the document() function parses the stylesheet itself. See Grouping Nodes” in Chapter 7 for all the details on the parameters to the document() function.

[2.0] In XSLT 2.0, the document() function can also take a second argument, a node used to find the base URI property of the requested documents. The base URI of the node is combined with the resource names in the first argument to form a complete URI.

Output

A [1.0] node-set or [2.0] sequence containing the nodes identified by the input argument. Again, Chapter 7 has all the details, so we won’t rehash them here.

Defined in

[1.0] XSLT section 12.1, “Multiple Source Documents.”

[2.0] XSLT section 16.1, “Multiple Source Documents.”

Example

The following example uses the document() function with an empty string to implement a lookup table. Here is our XML document:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- polist.xml --> <collection> <doc href="po38292.xml"/> <doc href="po38293.xml"/> ...