Question

I’m trying to transform an XML document into another XML document. I’ve tried various approaches, none of which produced the desired target XML document.

I have a hypothetical input XML document like this:

<rows>
 <row>
  <name>ON</name>
  <description/>
 </row>
 <row>
  <name>NY</name>
  <description/>
 </row>
</rows>

I also have two lookups:

<loc:locations>
 <loc:location>
  <loc:code>ON</loc:code>
  <loc:value>Ontario</loc:value>
 </loc:location>
 <loc:location>
  <loc:code>NY</loc:code>
  <loc:value>New York</loc:value>
 </loc:location>
</loc:locations>

<des:descriptions>
 <des:description>
  <des:code>ON</des:code>
  <des:value>Ontario is a province in Canada</des:value>
 </des:description>
 <des:description>
  <des:code>NY</des:code>
  <des:value>New York is a state in the USA</des:value>
 </des:description>
</des:descriptions>

I would like the input XML to be transformed into this target XML:

<places>
 <place>
  <name>Ontario</name>
  <description>Ontario is a province in Canada</description>
 </place>
 <place>
  <name>New York</name>
  <description>New York is a state in the USA</description>
 </place>
</places>

What is the XSLT that would accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

Just to clean-up things for readability, because you adopted namespace convention, you can also conveniently save all lookup data into a single variable. Also use current() to access name of current node. Avoid //.

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
    xmlns:loc="http://sample.com/location"
    xmlns:des="http://sample.com/description"
    version="1.0">

    <xsl:variable name="lookup" 
        select="document('locations.xml')/loc:locations/loc:location
        | document('descriptions.xml')/des:descriptions/des:description"/>

    <xsl:template match="rows">
        <places>
            <xsl:apply-templates/>
        </places>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="row">
        <place>
            <name>
                <xsl:value-of select="$lookup[loc:code=current()/name]/
                    loc:value"/>
            </name>
            <description>
                <xsl:value-of select="$lookup[des:code=current()/name]/
                    des:value"/>
            </description>
        </place>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>