XSLT Cookbook

Chapter 6. XML to XML

To change and to change for the better are two different things.

—German proverb

One of the beauties of XML is that if you don’t like something, you can change it. Since it is impossible to please everyone, transforming XML to XML is extremely common. However, you will not transform XML only to improve the structure of a poorly designed schema. Sometimes you need to merge disparate XML documents into a single document. At other times you want to break up a large document into smaller subdocuments. You might also wish to preprocess a document to filter out only the relevant information, without changing its structure, before sending it off for further processing.

A simple but important tool in many XML-to-XML transformations is the identity transform. This tool is a stylesheet that copies an input document to an output document without changing it. This task may seem better suited to the operating systems copy operation, but as the following examples demonstrate, this simple stylesheet can be imported into other stylesheets to yield very common types of transformations with little added coding effort.

Example 6-1 shows the identity stylesheet. I actually prefer calling this stylesheet the copying stylesheet, and I call the techniques that utilize it the overriding copy idiom.

Example 6-1. copy.xslt

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