CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javascriptxmlinternet-explorerxslt
John Aghadiuno
John Aghadiuno

Reputation: 1

XML transformation error. Working in IE8 but not an other browser. xmlDOM transformNode breaking newer browsers

I am having browser issues running the following scripts. It's a very old application I inherited and I can find no references to this issue that is not more than 5, 7 and 10 years ago.

The script works only when running IE in IE7 compatibility mode, and does not work in any other browser.

gei("calUTA").innerHTML = "<td><xml id=\"calXSLUTA\"><xsl:stylesheet version=\"1.0\" xmlns:xsl=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform\"><xsl:template match=\"/\"><xsl:for-each select=\"/root/month\"><xsl:if test=\"name=\'"+moName[showMo]+"\' and year=\'"+showYr+"\'\"><xsl:value-of select=\"uta\"/></xsl:if></xsl:for-each></xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet></xml></td>";

loopTrans("calXSLUTA","calUTA","big");

function loopTrans(f1,f2,z)
{       if (z == "big" || z == "stu") {
            xmlDOM = gei(z + "XML").XMLDocument;
        }
        xslDOM = eval(f1 + ".XMLDocument");
        gei(f2).innerHTML = xmlDOM.transformNode(xslDOM);     
}

Newer browsers appear to be erroring out while executing the transformNode function. Any help will be appreciated.

The specific error message returned is "Unable to get property 'transformNode' of undefined or null reference".

Upvotes: 0

Views: 96

Answers (1)

Martin Honnen
Martin Honnen

Reputation: 167571

The API to run client-side XSLT 1.0 by the browser from JavaScript in any other browsers but IE based ones is documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/XSLTProcessor. The whole IE legacy stuff like XML data islands is not even supported in the last IE versions, although they should still allow you to instantiate new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0') to have an XML DOM document to loadXML the XML input or the XSLT code from a string (or the load method to load from a URL) and then run transformNode on that created XML DOM.

So IE code would be like

var xmlDoc = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0');
xmlDoc.loadXML('<root><month>..<\/month><\/root>');

var xsltDoc = new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0');
xsltDoc.loadXML('<xsl:stylesheet version=\"1.0\" xmlns:xsl=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform\"><xsl:template match=\"/\"><xsl:for-each select=\"/root/month\"><xsl:if test=\"name=\'"+moName[showMo]+"\' and year=\'"+showYr+"\'\"><xsl:value-of select=\"uta\"/></xsl:if></xsl:for-each></xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>');

var transformationResult = xmlDoc.transformNode(xsltDoc); // assign the result string to innerHTML of an HTML element to render it

other browser like

var domParser = new DOMParser();

var xmlDoc = domParser.parseFromString('<root><month>..<\/month><\/root>', 'application/xml');

var xsltDoc = domParser.parseFromString('<xsl:stylesheet version=\"1.0\" xmlns:xsl=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform\"><xsl:template match=\"/\"><xsl:for-each select=\"/root/month\"><xsl:if test=\"name=\'"+moName[showMo]+"\' and year=\'"+showYr+"\'\"><xsl:value-of select=\"uta\"/></xsl:if></xsl:for-each></xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet>', 'application/xml');

var xsltProcessor = new XSLTProcessor();
xsltProcessor.importStylesheet(xsltDoc);

var transformationResult = xsltProcessor.transformToFragment(xmlDoc, document);  // insert this document fragment with e.g. appendChild to HTML element to render it

In any case, if you don't need IE support, I would consider ditching XSLT 1 and using Saxon-JS 2 and XSLT 3 instead. In any case, the use of an XSLT parameter with xsl:param instead of that string concatenation in <xsl:if test=\"name=\'"+moName[showMo]+"\' should make the code more robust.

Upvotes: 1

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