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xmlxsltxalan

Bypass lazy variable evaluation in Xalan XSLT

I am working on a XSLT that we are using to processes an XML file, and I need to trigger some action if an element is there. Created a Java Extension thinking I could simply set a variable it would evaluate like so:

<xsl:for-each select="//attachments/attachment" xmlns:fbattach="java://com.package.ProcessAttachment">
    <xsl:variable name="content"><xsl:value-of select="filedata" /></xsl:variable>
    <xsl:variable name="fileName"><xsl:value-of select="name"  /></xsl:variable>
    <xsl:variable name="fileType"><xsl:value-of select="fileType" /></xsl:variable>
    <xsl:variable name="attachmentId"><xsl:value-of select="fbattach:test($fileName, $fileType, $content)" /></xsl:variable>
</xsl:for-each>

The problem I am seeing is that attachmentId doesn't seem to get evaluated unless I do something like this:

<attatchment2><xsl:value-of select="$attachmentId" /></attatchment2>

It seems that Xalan is lazily-evaluating the variables, only doing the evaluation when it is being used for output. This and this seem to corroborate this theory.

Is there a way to force the evaluation, like a setting or something?

Solution

  • If you want to ensure that an expression is evaluated one way is to use it inside of xsl:message (https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-10/#message).