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XML Calabash Ant task

Inasmuch as I’d been threatening since the XML Summer School last year to do it, I’ve made a custom Ant task for running XML Calabash, currently only in my fork at git@github.com:MenteaXML/xmlcalabash1.git.

You can use this task to process:

  • A single input file to produce a single output file
  • A set of input files, processed one at a time, to produce a set of output files
  • Multiple input files as the input to one XProc input port processed to produce a single output file
  • Any of the above with additional input ports to each of which are applied one or more input files whose file names may be either fixed or mapped from the name(s) of the current main input file(s)
  • Any of the above with additional output ports whose file names may be either fixed or mapped from the name(s) of the current main input file(s)
  • Any of the above with Ant defaulting to not running the pipeline when the outputs are already up-to-date compared to the inputs and the pipeline

You can also specify options and parameters to be used by the pipeline. Continue reading “XML Calabash Ant task”

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use-when

Inasmuch as use-when is one of the standard attributes in XSLT 2.0 (and later) rather than being on a particular XSLT element, it seldom gets much of a mention; e.g., currently only 568 mentions on the XSL-List according to MarkMail (and some of those are false positives).

use-when (and xsl:use-when on non-XSLT elements) is for “conditional element inclusion” and is very useful for excluding elements that either aren’t currently useful or that will cause errors if acted upon. The use-when in the example below causes the xsl:value-of to be used only when saxon:line-number() is available, thereby avoiding the Saxon extension functions are not available under Saxon-HE message from more recent versions of Saxon HE where saxon:line-number() is no longer available but producing a useful result on older Saxon HE versions where the function is available.

<!-- Leftover intermediate elements. -->
<xsl:template match="t:*">
  <xsl:if test="$debug">
    <xsl:message>
      <xsl:value-of select="t:node-basename(.)" />
      <xsl:value-of
        use-when="function-available('saxon:line-number')"
        select="concat(':', saxon:line-number())"
        xmlns:saxon="http://saxon.sf.net/" />
      <xsl:text> :: </xsl:text>
      <xsl:copy-of select="." />
    </xsl:message>
  </xsl:if>
  <xsl:apply-templates />
</xsl:template>

The use-when expression is evaluated very early in the processing of the stylesheet, and you can’t use variable references in the expression. So don’t be tempted to try:

<xsl:message use-when="$debug">
...
</xsl:message>