Question

I have two XML files with two different XSD schemas and different namespaces. They have both an identical substructure. And now i need to copy that node (and all childs) from one XML document to the other one.

Clone would do, if the namespaces were the same. Is there a nice way to do it? (The substructure will change later on – but will be kept identical.)

Answer 1

Basically, you need an XSL transformation that creates new elements with equal names, but a different namespace.

Consider the following input XML:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <test xmlns='http://tempuri.org/ns_old'>     <child attrib='value'>text</child> </test> 

Now you need a template that says ‘copy structure and name of everything you see, but declare a new namespace while you’re at it’:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <xsl:stylesheet   version='1.0'   xmlns:xsl='http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform'   xmlns:old='http://tempuri.org/ns_old' >   <xsl:output method='xml' version='1.0'      encoding='UTF-8' indent='yes' omit-xml-declaration='no'    />    <xsl:template match='node()|@*'>     <xsl:copy>       <xsl:apply-templates select='node()|@*'/>     </xsl:copy>   </xsl:template>    <xsl:template match='old:*'>     <xsl:element name='{local-name()}' namespace='http://tempuri.org/ns_new'>       <xsl:apply-templates select='node()|@*'/>     </xsl:element>   </xsl:template>  </xsl:stylesheet> 

When you run the above XML through it, this produces:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?> <test xmlns='http://tempuri.org/ns_new'>   <child attrib='value'>text</child> </test> 

All your http://tempuri.org/ns_old elements have effectively changed their namespace. When your input XML has more than one namespace at the same time, the XSL must most likely be extended a bit.