The saxon:preprocess facet
Saxon provides the saxon:preprocess
facet as an addition to the standard
facets defined in the XSD 1.1 specification. It is available only when XSD 1.1 support
is enabled.
Like xs:whiteSpace
, this is a pre-lexical facet. It is used to transform
the supplied lexical value of an element or attribute from the form as written (but
after whitespace normalization) to the lexical space of the base type. Constraining
facets such as pattern
, enumeration
, and
minLength
apply to the value after the saxon:preprocess
facet has done its work. In addition, if the primitive type is say xs:date
or xs:decimal
, the built-in lexical rules for parsing a date or a decimal
number are applied only after saxon:preprocess
has transformed the value.
This makes it possible, for example, to accept yes
and no
as
values of an xs:boolean
, 3,14159
as the value of an
xs:decimal
, or 13DEC1987
as the value of an
xs:date
.
Like other facets, saxon:preprocess
may be used as a child of
xs:restriction
when restricting a simple type, or a complex type with
simple content.
The attributes are:
Attribute |
Usage |
id |
Standard attribute. |
action |
Mandatory. An XPath expression. The rules for writing the XPath expression are
generally the same as the rules for the |
reverse |
Optional. An XPath expression used to reverse the transformation. Used (in
XPath, XSLT, and XQuery) when a value of this type is converted to a string.
When a value of this type is converted to a string, it is first converted
according to the rules of the base type. The resulting string is then passed,
as the value of variable |
xpathDefaultNamespace |
The default namespace for element names (unlikely to appear in practice) and types. |
The following example converts a string to upper-case before testing it against the enumeration facet.
<xs:simpleType name="currency"> <xs:restriction base="xs:string"> <saxon:preprocess action="upper-case($value)" xmlns:saxon="http://saxon.sf.net/"/> <xs:enumeration value="USD"/> <xs:enumeration value="EUR"/> <xs:enumeration value="GBP"/> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType>Of course, it is not only the constraining facets that will see the preprocessed value (in this case, the upper-case value), any XPath operation that makes use of the typed value of an element or attribute node will also see the value after preprocessing. However, the string value of the node is unchanged.
The following example converts any commas appearing in the input to full stops, allowing
decimal numbers to be represented in Continental European style as 3,15
. On
output, the process is reversed, so that full stops are replaced by commas. (Note that
in this example, the user-defined type also accepts numbers written in the "standard"
style 3.15
.)
The following example allows an xs:time
value to be written with the
seconds part omitted. Again, it also accepts the standard hh:mm:ss
notation:
The following example uses extension function calls within the XPath expression to support integers written in hexadecimal notation:
<xs:simpleType name="hexInteger"> <xs:restriction base="xs:long"> <saxon:preprocess action="Long:parseLong($value, 16)" reverse="Long:toHexString(xs:long($value))" xmlns:Long="java:java.lang.Long" xmlns:saxon="http://saxon.sf.net/"/> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType>Given the input <val>0040</val>
, validated against this schema,
the query (val*3) cast as hexInteger
will produce the output
c0
.
If the xs:restriction
element defines facets other than
saxon:preprocess
, for example xs:enumeration
or
xs:minInclusive
, then the values supplied in these other facets are
validated against the rules for the base type: that is, they are not subject to
preprocessing. So a facet that defines US date formats earlier than a certain date might
look like this:
However, if the type is further restricted, then facets for derived types will be validated after preprocessing. So an alternative formulation of the above type would be:
<xs:simpleType name="us-date"> <xs:restriction base="xs:date"> <saxon:preprocess action="concat(substring($value, 7, 4), '-', substring($value, 1, 2), '-', substring($value, 4, 2))" xmlns:saxon="http://saxon.sf.net/"/> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType> <xs:simpleType name="us-date-before-2012"> <xs:restriction base="us-date"> <xs:maxInclusive value="12-31-2011"/> </xs:restriction> </xs:simpleType>The preprocess facet is not currently implemented for list or union types.