torsten's .NET blog - Fighting XslTransform

Friday, March 28, 2003

Fighting XslTransform

Yesterday it took me several hours to figure out how to get XslTransform work with output-escaping. I had thought, it should not be a problem to implement it based on my experiences with our intranet app. It uses .asp to get some xml from a BL Layer and transform it using the MSXML Parser and some xslt. There I can transform a DOM and get back a DOM and output-escaping is not a problem. Now moved it up to .NET XslTransform it does not work this way. Thanks to Prajakta Joshi [@microsoft.com] 's post I have learned to use a Stream as output, then read the stream back with StreamReader to get the string I need. Has that to be?

Technorati tags: XSL

Friday, March 28, 2003 9:11:02 AM (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)

Comments [1] |

Wednesday, June 04, 2003 3:04:45 PM (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Hi Torsten,

I think it's just a trade-off -- when you output XML through the XmlWriter.WriteString() we assume you really want it to be text and not XML. On the other hand, we *could* have made disable-output-escaping simply map to XmlWriter.WriteRaw(), but that probably isn't exactly what you wanted. For example, suppose you write out something like "<foo xmlns:bar='zzz'>" -- WriteRaw isn't going to complain or realize that namespace scope has changed, which defeats the purpose of using XmlWriter (you might as well use a StreamWriter at that point).

IMO, when people use disable-output-escaping, they are really just asking for something like XmlWriter.WriteXml(), which lets you pass in XML string to be parsed and then re-written to the writer (while maintaining namespace scope, etc.) Unfortunately the writer doesn't have any such capability today and no solid plans to enable it.

Regards,
Joshua
XmlWriter PM

Joshua Allen

Comments are closed.