Question

I am wondering if you can access the result-document during processing.

The reason I ask is that I am transforming an input document and would like to insert elements depending on some conditions but this would have to occur when I have traversed the tree and I am nearly at end of creating it.

The transformed xml looks something similar to this:

<xform>
    <xforms>
        <model>
            <instance>
                <data />
                <data />
            </instance>
        </model>
        <bind />
        <bind />
        <bind />
    </xforms>
</xform>

I intend, during transformation (before the above xml is serialized), to access the <instance> tag and insert additional <data> elements.

Note
The input document is different from the above xml – the above xml is what the transformation should produce.

Similarly, I would want to access the <xform> element and insert additional <bind> nodes.

So the final document would look like this (assuming I added 2 data nodes and 2 bind nodes):

<xform>
    <xforms>
        <model>
            <instance>
                <data />
                <data />
                <data>new data node</data>
                <data>second new data node</data>
            </instance>
        </model>
        <bind />
        <bind />
        <bind />
        <bind>new bind node</bind>
        <bind>second new bind node</bind>
    </xforms>
</xform>

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

No, you can’t access a result-document, you can however create temporary trees in variables and then process them again, if needed with templates with a different mode. So instead of e.g.

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:result-document href="example.xml">
<xform>
 <xforms>
  <model>
   <instance>
    <data>
    </data>
   </instance>
  </model>
  <bind />
  <bind />
  <bind />
 </xforms>
</xform>
  </xsl:result-document>
</xsl:template>

you would create the first result in a variable and then process it further as in e.g.

<xsl:template match="@* | node()">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:variable name="temp1">
<xform>
 <xforms>
  <model>
   <instance>
    <data>
    </data>
   </instance>
  </model>
  <bind />
  <bind />
  <bind />
 </xforms>
</xform>
</xsl:variable>
  <xsl:result-document href="example.xml">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="$temp1/*"/>
  </xsl:result-document>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="instance">
  <xsl:copy>
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
    <data>...</data>
  </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

That sample does not use modes but I often use them with variables and different processing steps to cleanly seperate the templates for each step from other steps.