Concatenating xml files

I have several xml files, the names of which are stored in another xml file.

I want to use xsl to produce a summary of the combination of the xml files. I remember there was a way to do this with the msxml extensions (I'm using msxml).

I know I can get the content of each file using select="document(filename)" but I'm not sure how to combine all these documents into one.

21-Oct-08 I should have mentioned that I want to do further processing on the combined xml, so it is not sufficient to just output it from the transform, I need to store it as a node set in a variable.

Solution

Here is just a small example of what you could do:

file1.xml:

<foo>
<bar>Text from file1</bar>
</foo>

file2.xml:

<foo>
<bar>Text from file2</bar>
</foo>

index.xml:

<index>
<filename>file1.xml</filename>
<filename>file2.xml</filename>

summarize.xsl:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
    xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common"
    extension-element-prefixes="exsl">

  <xsl:variable name="big-doc-rtf">
      <xsl:for-each select="/index/filename">
        <xsl:copy-of select="document(.)"/>
      </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:variable>

  <xsl:variable name="big-doc" select="exsl:node-set($big-doc-rtf)"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:element name="summary">
      <xsl:apply-templates select="$big-doc/foo"/>
    </xsl:element>  
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="foo">
    <xsl:element name="text">
      <xsl:value-of select="bar"/>
    </xsl:element>  
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Applying the stylesheet to index.xml gives you:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><summary><text>Text from file1</text><text>Text from file2</text></summary>

The trick is to load the different documents with the document function (extension function supported by almost all XSLT 1.0 processors), to output the contents as part of a variable body and then to convert the variable to a node-set for further processing.