XSLT, 2nd Edition

Summary

This chapter completes our tour of the XSLT and XPath functions that work with multiple documents. These powerful functions allow us to generate an output document containing elements from many different input documents. In our examples here, we generated several views of those input documents, but many more combinations might be useful. The biggest benefit of these functions is that they allows us to define views of multiple documents that are separate from those documents themselves. As we need to define other views, we don’t have to change our input documents.

We also looked at using the new unparsed-text() function to read non-XML data and add it to our result documents. The functions we’ve discussed here can save you a tremendous amount of development time in generating reports and other summarizing documents.