| SAXONICA |
Some performance improvements have been made to the code for calling Java extension functions. Thanks to Wolfgang Hoschek for providing these.
The ability to define user-written functions as memo functions is now available in XQuery as well as XSLT.
In XQuery this is achieved by preceding the function decilaration with declare option saxon:memo-function 'true'.
The effect is that the function caches its results, so if it is called again with the same arguments it returns the remembered
result.
The extension function saxon:serialize() has been enhanced. As an alternative to the existing
format, the second argument may now be a (dynamically-constructed) xsl:output element, allowing
full access to all serialization properties, and allowing all the properties to be defined dynamically. This
works in both XSLT and XQuery.
The use of external object types in namespace http://saxon.sf.net/java-type now reflects the
Java type hierarchy. For example, if a variable is declared to accept a type of jt:java.util.List, then
a value of type jt:java.util.ArrayList will be accepted, but a value of type jt:java.util.HashMap
will not. The same applies to the new namespace http://saxon.sf.net/.net-type used for
external .NET types.
A new extension function saxon:generate-id() is available. The semantics are identical to the XSLT
function generate-id(): the function returns an ASCII alphanumeric string that uniquely identifies the node
supplied as the argument (there must always be exactly one argument). This extension function is made available
to provide the same capability as generate-id() in non-XSLT environments, for example in XQuery.
The extension functions saxon:max(), saxon:min(), and saxon:sum(),
which have long been deprecated,
are now dropped from the product.
In the saxon:evaluate() function under XSLT, the default
namespace for elements and types is taken from the value of the xpath-default-namespace
attribute in the stylesheet, if present. Previously it was taken from the default namespace declared
using xmlns="xyz.uri", which was a bug. (In XQuery the net effect is no change, because
there is only one default namespace.)
The documentation of other extension functions involving sequences of nodes, such as saxon:leading,
has been changed to reflect the fact that the sequences of nodes on which they operate may contain duplicates
and might not be in document order. The implementation of these functions has not been changed, the documentation
has been corrected to describe the current behavior.
A new serialization parameter saxon:supply-source-locator="yes"|"no" is provided. This is intended
for use when sending output to a user-written ContentHandler (that is, to a SAXResult).
The effect of the option is that information is sent to the Locator supplied to the
ContentHandler identifying the position of the context node in the source document. To access this
information, the supplied Locator must be cast to its implementation class.
