Running Saxon XSLT transformations from Ant

It is possible to run a Saxon transformation from Ant using the standard xslt task, by using the trax processor and with an appropriate classpath that forces Saxon to be selected. However, this doesn't provide the ability to take advantage of the full range of capabilities offered by XSLT 2.0 in general and Saxon in particular (for example, schema aware processing and multiple output files). Saxon 8.9 therefore includes the first early release of a custom Ant task for Saxon.

The is available in saxon8-ant.jar, under the class name net.sf.saxon.ant.AntTransform. At this early stage it differs little from the standard xslt task:

• The processor and classpath attributes have no effect.

• There is a new boolean attribute schemaaware indicating whether the transformation should be schema-aware.

• There is a new attribute validation allowing the values strict, lax, or skip. The schema itself must be specified either in the stylesheet (using xsl:import-schema) or in the source document (using xsi:schemaLocation).

Example usage:

    <target name="release-userdoc" description="Generate User Documentation">
			<taskdef name="saxon-xslt" 
			         classname="net.sf.saxon.ant.AntTransform" 
			         classpath="c:\saxon\saxon8sa.jar;c:\saxon\licenses"/>

			<saxon-xslt in="${userdoc.dir}/catalog.xml" 
			            style="${userdoc.dir}/render-page2.xsl"
			            schemaaware="true"
			            validation="strict" 
			            out="${release.dir}/resources/doc/dummy.html">
			  <param name="destination" expression="offline"/>
			</saxon-xslt>  
    </target>

The above example was used to generate this documentation. With multiple output files, a single document is specified for the principal output (which may be a dummy), and all other output files are written in relative locations with respect to this.