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Recoverable XSLT Errors

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The W3C XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 Recommendation includes areas in which the implementation provider may decide how to handle a situation. These areas are considered to be discretionary behavior. For example, in section 7.3 Creating Processing Instructions, the XSLT 1.0 recommendation states that it is an error if instantiating the content of xsl:processing-instruction creates nodes other than text nodes. For some problems, the XSLT 1.0 recommendation indicates what decision should be made if the processor decides to recover from the error. For the problem given in section 7.3, the W3C says that the implementation can recover from this error by ignoring the nodes and their content.

Discretionary Behaviors

The following table lists each of the discretionary behaviors allowed by the XSLT 1.0 recommendation, and how these behaviors are handled by the XslCompiledTransform class.

XSLT condition Section XslCompiledTransform behavior
A text node matches both xsl:strip-space and xsl:preserve-space. 3.4 Recover
A source node matches more than one template rule. 5.5 Recover
A namespace URI is declared to be an alias for multiple namespace URIs, all having the same import precedence. 7.1.1 Recover
The name attribute in xsl:attribute and xsl:element generated from an attribute value is not a QName. 7.1.2, 7.1.3 Error*
Two attribute sets with the same import and expanded-name have an attribute in common and there is no other attribute set containing the common attribute having the same name with higher importance. 7.1.4 Recover
Adding an attribute to an element after children have been added to it. 7.1.3 Error*
Creating an attribute with the name 'xmlns' 7.1.3 Error*
Adding an attribute to a node that is not an element. 7.1.3 Error*
Creating nodes other than text nodes during the instantiation of the content of the xsl:attribute attribute. 7.1.3 Error*
The name attribute of an xsl:processing-instruction does not yield both an NCName and a processing instruction target. 7.3 Error*
Instantiating the content of xsl:processing-instruction creates nodes other than text nodes. 7.3 Error*
The result of instantiating the content of the xsl:processing-instruction contains the string "?>" 7.3 Recover
The result of instantiating the content of the xsl:processing-instruction contains the string "--" or ends with "-". 7.4 Recover
The result of instantiating the content of the xsl:comment creates nodes other than text nodes. 7.4 Error*
The template within a variable-binding element returns an attribute node or a namespace node. 11.2 Error*
There is an error retrieving the resource from the URI passed into the document function. 12.1 Error
The URI reference in the document function contains a fragment identifier and there is an error processing the fragment identifier. 12.1 Recover*
There are multiple attributes with the same name, but different values, that are not named cdata-section elements in xsl:output with the same import precedence. 16 Recover
The processor does not support the encoding in the xsl:output encoding attribute. 16.1 Recover
Disabling output escaping for a text node that is used for something other than a text node in the result tree. 16.4 Recover*
Converting a result tree fragment to a number or string if the result tree fragment contains a text node with output escaping enabled. 16.4 Recover*
Output escaping is disabled for a character that cannot be represented in the encoding that the XSLT processor is using for output. 16.4 Recover*
Adding a namespace node to an element after children have been added to it or after attributes have been added to it. errata 25 Error*
The value attribute of an xsl:number is NAN, infinite or less than 0.5 errata 24 Recover
The second argument node-set to the document function is empty and the URI reference is relative. errata 14 Recover

* This behavior is different than that of the XslTransform class. For more information, see Implementation of Discretionary Behaviors in the XslTransform Class.

See also