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Re: [xsl] Call java function to do background work

2012-06-12 12:11:00

It's not a good idea to do something involving side-effects while evaluating a variable, because optimizers tend to assume that evaluating a variable is something they can do as and when and as often as they please. If the variable isn't used, it's very likely that it will never be evaluated; if two variables are involved, it's unpredictable which order they will be evaluated in. In some cases an optimizer might decide to evaluate a variable repeatedly rather than allocating memory to hold its value.

It might not seem an obvious approach, but my suggestion would be to do this using xsl:result-document. That's about the closest XSLT gets to an instruction designed to have side effects, and there are rules about its behaviour designed to limit the damage that optimizers can do. There's still no absolute rule ensuring the order in which different result documents are generated (in recent Saxon releases, you can create lots of result documents in parallel), but at least there's a reasonable chance that each one will be written exactly once.

In Saxon there's a mechanism (the OutputURIResolver) that allows the Java application to intercept calls to xsl:result-document. So by encapsulating the information needed by the application within the URI given to the result document (or putting it within the document itself) you can use xsl:result-document as a way of saying "here's some information, please process it in the background".

Michael Kay
Saxonica

On 12/06/2012 16:07, Ming Yu wrote:
Sorry if this is a very simple question but I couldn't seem to come up with a 
neat solution.

During xslt transformation, I need to call a java function to do some background work 
(such as adding some values to the database, etc). The java function doesn't need to 
return anything. At this moment, I just use the normail<xsl:value-of>  tag to 
append to a variable. Since it doesn't return anything, the variable value stays the 
same.

Is there a neater to achieve this goal?

Thanks a lot!

Ming

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