Re: document()-function, using 2 arguments

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman at CraneSoftwrights dot com>]

At 00/04/04 14:33 +0200, michael gruber wrote:
>Has anybody some examples on how to use the second argument in the
>document function?
>Don't know whether it's useful or not but I don't want missing
>anything...
>I've read the spec, but I didn't understand it :-(

I was obliged to use the second argument in my book production environment.

I have a "share" construct in my XML that allows me to define content in 
another XML file and access it algorithmically through an unparsed NDATA 
entity.  I am not using the other XML file syntactically through XML parsed 
entity referencing ... each package of content is named in the shared file 
and I am pointing to a package through an NDATA entity for the file and 
pulling in content from that remote entity according to the share 
construct.  With my book spread out over a number of subdirectories, I have 
relative paths between subdirectories in my SYSTEM identifiers for my NDATA 
entities.

Recall that every node in the source and stylesheet node trees has a "Base 
URI" being the URI of the entity in which the node is found when read by 
the XML processor inside the XSLT processor.

Recall also that if you do not supply a second argument to the document() 
function then the a relative first argument value is resolved relative to 
the stylesheet node's base URI (hence, relative to the subdirectory in 
which the stylesheet is found).  If you do supply a second argument to the 
document() function, a relative first argument is resolved relative to the 
base URI of the node in the supplied second argument.

In my situation I was using relative SYSTEM identifiers in my unparsed 
entity declaration and I was omitting the second argument ... thus, when 
the XSLT processor resolved my relative addresses, it was going relative to 
my stylesheet directory which is one level higher in my directory structure 
than my XML storage directory ... hence, my shared file of XML was never 
being found!

My fix was to change the call from "document($file)" to be 
"document($file,.)" which supplied my current XML source file node instead 
of the default current XSLT stylesheet file node ... and my relative 
addresses were then being resolved relative to my data directory and not 
relative to my stylesheet directory ... everything started to work and I 
*finally* understood that second argument for myself.

I hope this has helped.

................. Ken

--
G. Ken Holman                    mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
Crane Softwrights Ltd.             http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
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