Configuration interfaces
At the heart of Saxon is the object net.sf.saxon.Configuration. This contains all the current settings of configuration
options. All Saxon tasks, such as compiling and running queries and transformations, or
building and validating source documents, happen under the control of a
Configuration. Many resources are owned by the Configuration,
meaning that related tasks must run under the same Configuration. Most
notably, the Configuration holds a NamePool, which is a table allocating integer codes
to the qualified names that appear in stylesheets, queries, schemas, and source documents,
and during the execution of a stylesheet or query all the resources used (for example, the
stylesheet, all its input documents, and any schemas it uses) must all use the same
NamePool to ensure that they all use the same integer codes for the same
qualified names. However, two Saxon tasks that are unrelated can run under different
Configuration objects.
There are subclasses of Configuration containing resources associated with the
capabilities of the different Saxon editions: specifically, com.saxonica.config.ProfessionalConfiguration and com.saxonica.config.EnterpriseConfiguration. In many cases the
Configuration is used as a factory class to deliver services associated
with the different capability levels, for example the method getOptimizer()
returns the query optimizer appropriate to the loaded Saxon edition.
Many configuration options have direct setter and getter methods on the
Configuration object, for example setAllowExternalFunctions()
and isAllowExternalFunctions(). Some other options have setters and getters on
objects reachable from the Configuration, for example defaults for XSLT
processing can be controlled using methods such as
getDefaultXsltCompilerInfo().setXsltVersion(), while defaults for XQuery
processing can be controlled using methods such as
getDefaultStaticQueryContext().setLanguageVersion().
The most general mechanism for getting and setting configuration properties, however, is
provided by the methods getConfigurationProperty(name) and
setConfigurationProperty(name, value). In these methods the name of the
configuration property is always a string in the form of a URI (for example,
"http://saxon.sf.net/feature/initialTemplate"), and the strings available
are all defined by constants in the class net.sf.saxon.lib.FeatureKeys (for example,
FeatureKeys.INITIAL_TEMPLATE). The value is of various types depending on
the property. In the vast majority of cases, the property can be supplied as a string, or
it has an alternative, equivalent property that can be supplied as a string. For properties
that are essentially boolean in nature the value can be supplied either as one of the Java
constants Boolean.TRUE or Boolean.FALSE, or as one of the strings
"true", "1", "yes", "on", or "false", "0", "no", "off". These choices are designed to suit
the conventions of different APIs in which the configuration options are exposed.
In many APIs for controlling Saxon activities, the Configuration object is not
exposed directly, but is hidden below some similar object acting as the root object for
that particular API. Many of these objects provide a direct way to set the configuration
options. These are discussed in the following sections.