Question

I am working on creating an XSL to format some incoming XML from an API I am integrating. The xml I receive looks like:

<items>
  <item xmlns="http://www.tempuri.org/Item.xsd">
    <key>value</key>
  </item>
  <item>
    <key>value</key>
  </item>
  <item xmlns="http://www.tempuri.org/Item.xsd">
    <key>value</key>
  </item>
</items>

Some of the “item” nodes have the “xmlns” attribute defined, while others do not. When I attempt to iterate through the results in my XSL, it is not finding the nodes that have the xmlns attribute defined.

<xsl:for-each select="item">
  <xsl:value-of select="key" />
</xsl:for-each>

I am sort of new to the whole XSL thing, so I’m not sure what I am doing wrong.

Answer 1

You’ll need to define the same namespace in your <xsl:stylesheet> definition.

Then:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:ns="http://www.tempuri.org/Item.xsd"
    extension-element-prefixes="exsl"
    encoding="utf-8">

. . .

<xsl:for-each select="item|ns:item">
    <xsl:value-of select="key|ns:key"/>
</xsl:for-each>

Really you should try and use the same namespace for things that are the same.