Saxon Documentation

Full Contents

About Saxon

Changes in this Release

Licensing

Using XSLT 2.0

Using XQuery

Handling Source Documents

XML Schema Processing

XPath API for Java

Saxon on .NET

Extensibility

Saxon Extensions

Sample Saxon Applications

The Saxon SQL Extension

XSLT Elements
	Introduction
	xsl:analyze-string
	xsl:apply-imports
	xsl:apply-templates
	xsl:attribute
	xsl:attribute-set
	xsl:call-template
	xsl:character-map
	xsl:choose
	xsl:comment
	xsl:copy
	xsl:copy-of
	xsl:decimal-format
	xsl:document
	xsl:element
	xsl:fallback
	xsl:for-each
	xsl:for-each-group
	xsl:function
	xsl:if
	xsl:include
	xsl:import
	xsl:import-schema
	xsl:key
	xsl:matching-substring
	xsl:message
	xsl:namespace
	xsl:namespace-alias
	xsl:next-match
	xsl:non-matching-substring
	xsl:number
	xsl:otherwise
	xsl:output
	xsl:output-character
	xsl:param
	xsl:perform-sort
	xsl:preserve-space
	xsl:processing-instruction
	xsl:result-document
	xsl:sequence
	xsl:sort
	xsl:strip-space
	xsl:stylesheet
»	xsl:template
	xsl:text
	xsl:value-of
	xsl:variable
	xsl:when
	xsl:with-param
	Literal Result Elements
	XSLT Patterns

XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax

Function Library

Standards Conformance

xsl:template

The xsl:template element defines a processing rule for source elements or other nodes of a particular type.

The type of node to be processed is identified by a pattern, written in the mandatory match attribute. The most common form of pattern is simply an element name. However, more complex patterns may also be used: The syntax of patterns is given in more detail in XSLT Pattern Syntax

The following examples show some of the possibilities:

Pattern	Meaning
XXX	Matches any element whose name (tag) is XXX
*	Matches any element
XXX/YYY	Matches any YYY element whose parent is an XXX
XXX//YYY	Matches any YYY element that has an ancestor named XXX
/*/XXX	Matches any XXX element that is immediately below the root (document) element
*[@ID]	Matches any element with an ID attribute
XXX[1]	Matches any XXX element that is the first XXX child of its parent element. (Note that this kind of pattern can be very inefficient: it is better to match all XXX elements with a single template, and then use xsl:if to distinguish them)
SECTION[TITLE="Contents"]	Matches any SECTION element whose first TITLE child element has the value "Contents"
A/TITLE \| B/TITLE \| C/TITLE	Matches any TITLE element whose parent is of type A or B or C
text()	Matches any character data node
@*	Matches any attribute
/	Matches the document node

The xsl:template element has an optional mode attribute. If this is present, the template will only be matched when the same mode is used in the invoking xsl:apply-templates element. The value can be a list of mode names, indicating that the template matches more than one mode; this list can include the token #default to indicate that the template matches the default (unnamed) mode. Alternatively the mode attribute can be set to #all, to indicate that the template matches all modes. (This can be useful in conjunction with xsl:next-match: one can write a template rule that matches in all modes, and then call xsl:next-match to continue processing in the original mode.)

There is also an optional name attribute. If this is present, the template may be invoked directly using xsl:call-template. The match attribute then becomes optional.

If there are several xsl:template elements that all match the same node, the one that is chosen is determined by the optional priority attribute: the template with highest priority wins. The priority is written as a floating-point number; the default priority is 1. If two matching templates have the same priority, the one that appears last in the stylesheet is used.

Examples:

The following examples illustrate different kinds of template and match pattern.

Example 1: a simple XSLT template for a particular element. This example causes all <ptitle> elements in the source document to be output as HTML <h2> elements.

<xsl:template match="ptitle">
    <h2>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </h2>
</xsl:template>