Saxon - s9api - setParameter as node and access in transformation

Question

we are trying to add parameters to a transformation at the runtime. The only possible way to do so, is to set every single parameter and not a node. We don't know yet how to create a node for the setParameter.

Current setParameter:

QName TEST XdmAtomicValue 24

Expected setParameter:

<TempNode> <local>Value1</local> </TempNode>

We searched and tried to create a XdmNode and XdmItem.

Answer 1

If you want to create an XdmNode by parsing XML, the best way to do it is:

DocumentBuilder db = processor.newDocumentBuilder();
XdmNode node = db.build(new StreamSource(
                  new StringReader("<doc><elem/></doc>")));

You could also pass a string containing lexical XML as the parameter value, and then convert it to a tree by calling the XPath parse-xml() function.

If you want to construct the XdmNode programmatically, there are a number of options:

1. DocumentBuilder.newBuildingStreamWriter() gives you an instance of BuildingStreamWriter which extends XmlStreamWriter, and you can create the document by writing events to it using methods such as writeStartElement, writeCharacters, writeEndElement; at the end call getDocumentNode() on the BuildingStreamWriter, which gives you an XdmNode. This has the advantage that XmlStreamWriter is a standard API, though it's not actually a very nice one, because the documentation isn't very good and as a result implementations vary in their behaviour.

2. Another event-based API is Saxon's Push class; this differs from most push-based event APIs in that rather than having a flat sequence of methods like:

    builder.startElement('x'); 
    builder.characters('abc'); 
    builder.endElement();

you have a nested sequence:

    Element x = Document.elem('x');
    x.text('abc');
    x.close(); 

3. As mentioned by Martin, there is the "sapling" API: Saplings.doc().withChild(elem(...).withChild(elem(...)) etc. This API is rather radically different from anything you might be familiar with (though it's influenced by the LINQ API for tree construction on .NET) but once you've got used to it, it reads very well. The Sapling API constructs a very light-weight tree in memory (hance the name), and converts it to a fully-fledged XDM tree with a final call of SaplingDocument.toXdmNode().

4. If you're familiar with DOM, JDOM2, or XOM, you can construct a tree using any of those libraries and then convert it for use by Saxon. That's a bit convoluted and only really intended for applications that are already using a third-party tree model heavily (or for users who love these APIs and prefer them to anything else).