I suppose this is because the parameter is of type string, and the
select attribute requires a node set. How do I solve this?
this is a FAQ.
Some systems (saxon, and xalan for example) have an evaluate extension
that allows a string to be evaluated as an X{ath expression, however
there are more poratble alternatives.
In simple cases you can pass in a string used to make up
the expression, so instead of
para-xpath=/root/data[(_at_)id='whatever'
...
<xsl:apply-templates select="$para-xpath"/>
para-id=whatever
<xsl:apply-templates select="/root/data[(_at_)id=$para-id]"/>
Otherwise if you are calling XSLT from some API rather than the command
line it is usually possible to make the parameter have a value being the
node set itself rather than an Xpath taht selects the node set.
Typically you use some Xpath interface to a DOM to select teh node set
and then pass that in as the parameter, then your
<xsl:apply-templates select="$para-xpath"/>
would work.
The key problem is that I need to transform a subset of a larger XML
stream, where the subset is defined through an XPath expression and all
this must happen within XSL in order to avoid cross-domain security
constrains in JavaScript.
hmm so the last possibility may not be avaolable to you.
Any recommendations welcome.
You could ask the XSLT WG to reconsider adding evaluate to xpath 2....
Or you can have a two pass approach, take the xpath expression from teh
source and generate a stylesheet that uses that expression, then run teh
generated stylesheet.
David
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