CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaxmltransformationxslt
Jigish Chawda
Jigish Chawda

Reputation: 2178

Unusual output for XSL transformations

I have an xml document and a style sheet to convert the document into another useful xml. For the reference the xml document is somewhat like this:

<root>
 <element1>value1</element1>
 <element2>value2</element2>
 <element3>value3</element3>
 <element4>..some more levels of data</element4>
</root>

The style sheet looks somewhat like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:include href="errorResponse.xsl"/>
<xsl:template match="root/element4">
        <xsl:element name="myRoot">
            <xsl:element name="myElement">
                <xsl:apply-templates select="./someElement/someOtherElement"/>
            </xsl:element>
        </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>

The output xml string which I am getting is like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
value1
value2
value3
<myRoot><myelement> some data </myElemrnt></myroot>

The code snippet which I am using for transformation is this:

InputStream styleSheet = new FileUtil().getFileStream("xsltFileName");
StreamSource xslStream = new StreamSource(styleSheet);

DOMSource in = new DOMSource(inputXMLDoc);
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

TransformerFactory transFact = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
transFact.setURIResolver(new XsltURIResolver());
Transformer trans = transFact.newTransformer(xslStream);
trans.transform(in, new StreamResult(baos));
System.out.println(baos.toString()); // displays the above output

However the output is in undesired format. I dont want value1, value2, value3. This is also creating problems further for the new XML generated, to be processed.

I have seen a lot of questions around the transformations. This is bugging me for a long time. Appreciate a lot if someone could point out where I am going wrong.

Also point out if I am following any incorrect conventions during the entire process.

Thanks and regards.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 110

Answers (2)

Dimitre Novatchev
Dimitre Novatchev

Reputation: 243459

What happens here is that the XSLT built-in templates are applied to any node not matched explicitly by a template. The net effect of the built-in templates is to copy any text node (on which tey are applied) to the output.

One of the simplest and shortest way to supress this unwanted output is to add the following template:

<xsl:template match="text()"/>

which causes any text-node for which this template is selected for execution, not to be copied to the output.

Upvotes: 1

Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison

Reputation: 86744

You are getting that output because of the Default Template Rule, which outputs the text nodes. If you don't want those nodes you need to exclude them explicitly by matching them and replacing them with nothing (i.e. an empty template).

Try adding this template to your stylesheet:

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:apply-templates select="root/element4"/>
</xsl:template>

It matches the root and discards everything except for root/element4.

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions