saxon:try

The saxon:try instruction evaluates an XPath expression in its select attribute, or a sequence of child instructions. If any dynamic error occurs while performing this evaluation, the error may be caught by an xsl:catch instruction that is written as a child of the xsl:try. For example, the following code catches a failure occurring while executing the document() function, and returns an <error-document/> element if this occurs.

<xsl:variable name="doc" as="document-node()"> <saxon:try select="document($input-uri)"> <saxon:catch errors="*"> <xsl:document> <error-document/> </xsl:document> </saxon:catch> </saxon:try> </xsl:variable>

The saxon:try element must contain at least one saxon:catch child, and it may contain several. Each one specifies which errors it is intended to catch in its errors attribute; the value * catches all errors. The first saxon:catch to match the error code is the one that is evaluated. The saxon:catch children must come after all other children, with the exception of any xsl:fallback children (which can be included to define fallback behaviour by processors that do not recognize the saxon:try instruction.

The saxon:try element may have either a select attribute, or a sequence of child instructions (preceding the first xsl:catch); it must not have both.

saxon:try is available in Saxon-EE only