[xsl] Impact of xml doc size on transformation

[Jitu <jibhatia at andiamo dot com>]

What is the size of XML documents that can be reliably transformed using 
XSLT ?

This question is w.r.t a reporting application that i am writing where, 
the data is fetched from various sources (like database and ldap etc.), 
it is put in a xml format and saved. Then we use xsl to transform it 
into html and serve it to the end user on a web browser.
The report data xml file may be huge, ranging from a few hundreds of 
records to thousands.

The user is presented with only 10 records at a time. This is done by 
using xsl to transform the report xml file into html and just pickup 
first 10 records initially. When the user presses next, i again pickup 
this xml file apply xsl and pickup next 10 records. This way i am able 
to provide him paging functionality, and do not need to re-generate the 
report everytime.

Similarly user can sort by clicking on a column header. Again i go back 
and transform the xml using xsl:sort etc..

What i am worried about is what would be the behaviour when there are is 
too much data in my xml file - say 5,000 or 10,000 records. What is a 
reaonable maximum.

(As you can see one of the reasons xml is being used here is to avoid 
re-generating the report everytime user clicks NEXT/PREVIOUS etc.. So 
xml is also a caching mechanism here.)

Please let me know your valuable inputs in this regard
Jitu


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