xml-dev - Re: transformations

[Steve Muench <smuench@us.oracle.com>]

| I agree a forward-only streamable subset of XSLT/XPath would be very useful.
| Upon further investigation streaming-transformations may turn out to be a
| completely different animal.

Chris,

How close in your opinion is Michael Kay's <saxon:preview> extension
documented at:

http://users.iclway.co.uk/mhkay/saxon/saxon6.0/extensions.html#saxon:preview

to solving the customer problem that a "streamable subset"
is trying to accomplish?

In the database/XML environment the problem is typically
transforming huge XML documents which are huge because
they are thousands or millions of repeating "subdocuments"
wrapped by an outer, containing element. Not unsurprisingly
these "subdocuments" often are produced from rows in a 
database query. If the transformation that needs to be
performed just needs to work on each <ROW> at a time
(that is, each "subdocument") -- but never needs to
do things like select the last() element or navigate
back to the "/" root -- it seems like this kind of
solution may be workable.

Is the "streamable subset" you're thinking
of trying to solve the "large document" problem, or some
kind of browser-side, incremental transformation?

Just curious.

______________________________________________________________
Steve Muench, Lead XML Evangelist & Consulting Product Manager
BC4J & XSQL Servlet Development Teams, Oracle Rep to XSL WG
Author "Building Oracle XML Applications", O'Reilly
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/orxmlapp/