xml-dev - RE: Didier's lab report

[Didier PH Martin <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hi Curt,

Curt said:
It should be possible for an XSLT implementation to use asynchronous
retrieval of document() using variables.

Say, if you had something like this

<xsl:transform ....>

	<xsl:variable name="doc1" select="document('doc1.xml',.)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="doc2" select="document('doc2.xml',.)"/>
	<xsl:variable name="doc3" select="document('doc3.xml',.)"/>


	<xsl:template match="/">
		<xsl:apply-templates/>
	</xsl:template>

	...
</xsl:transform>

The declaration of the variable could start the download/parsing process but
not block further execution.  Only when the variable was used in an
expression
would the template evaluation thread need to block.

I do not know if any of the existing processors implement this type of
behavior,
however it would not seem to require any changes to XSLT to approach the
performance that you estimated for XInclude.

Didier replies:
If I understand you well, this would imply first that we are allowed to use
as a variable an external document tree. Then, if the XSLT processor
recognizes that the select is a document() function, that the XSLT processor
starts a thread to set the variable to a tree (will take as much time as the
external server will take to return the resulting document). After having
started a thread, the XSLT engine would go to the next variable assignment.

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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