XSLT loop inside XSLT variable

Question

I have a question regarding the XSLT, basically I have some transformation to do, but at the end i would like to have all the transformations i've done inside one xslt:variable.

Basically what i mean is something like this, of course the xslt will be more complex, but just to illustrate what i mean is following:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:x="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <xsl:output method="html" indent="no"/>
    <xsl:decimal-format NaN=""/>
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:call-template name="base_template"/>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template name="base_template">
            <!-- This is what i mean -->
            <xsl:variable name="general_variale">

                <xsl:call-template name="template_three" />

                <br />

                <xsl:call-template name="template_two" />

                <br />

                <xsl:call-template name="template_one" />               

            </xsl:variable>
        </xsl:template>

            <xsl:template name="template_three">
            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">   

                <xsl:variable name="id" select="@ID" />

                <xsl:for-each select="$filteredRows_Releases">
                    <process name="$id">
                        ....
                    </process>
                </xsl:for-each>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </xsl:template>

        <xsl:template name="template_two">
            <xsl:for-each select="$Rows">   

                <xsl:variable name="id" select="@ID" />

                <xsl:for-each select="$filteredRows_Releases">
                    <task name="$id">
                        ....
                    </task>
                </xsl:for-each>
            </xsl:for-each>
        </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

With this xslt i would like to have a general_variable look somethink like this:

<process name="somename">
</process>
...
<task name="somename">
</task>
...

Will this work or it isn't possible?

Answer 1

Yes, you can capture the result of any processing in a variable in this way.

However, in XSLT 1.0 there are restrictions on how you can use the resulting variable: it's known as a result tree fragment. If you want to process it in any interesting ways, you will need the exslt:node-set() extension to convert it to a regular document tree. In XSLT 2.0 this restriction is removed.