XSLT conditional include of external file

Question

I want to perform a conditional include in XSLT, but xsl:include is a top level element. You can only use xsl:if or xsl:choose inside of a template. Is there any kind of hac

Answer 1

Not sure if this would apply to your scenario, but I'm going to throw this out there anyways.

I've done similar things in the past, but instead of doing a conditional include, I call a template in either one of the two files based on what the xsl:when evaluates to. If you don't want to use templates in your case, disregard this answer.

For instance, say the "parent" xslt file is called root.xslt, and the two conditionally-used ones are child1.xslt and child2.xslt. Say I want to run conditional logic against the value of a node called status. If the value is "CURRENT", I want to call a template called isCurrent in child1.xslt, otherwise call a template called isNotCurrent in child2.xslt. For the sake of brevity, in each case I'm simply passing the template the root node and all children.

It'd look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl">
    <xsl:import href="child1.xslt"/>
    <xsl:import href="child2.xslt"/>

    <xsl:template match="/">
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="rootNode/status = 'CURRENT'">
          <!-- template isCurrent defined in child1.xslt -->
          <xsl:apply-templates select="rootNode" mode="isCurrent" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          <!-- template isNotCurrent defined in child2.xslt -->
          <xsl:apply-templates select="rootNode" mode="isNotCurrent" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Hope this at least helps a little bit.

Answer 2

<xsl:variable name="CONDITIONAL" select="ELEMENT/CONDITION"/>
<xsl:variable name="DOCUMENTNAME" select="document(concat($CONDITIONAL,'-DOCUMENT.xml'))/ELEMENT"/>

This example is how I did a conditional use of an external file. I had the flag in the base XML that the XSL uses as a variable to help specify the name of the other file to pull into the template. Once that variable is defined as in my case I use it to pull other XML data into the generated output. The concat command forces the data together to give a file name.

So When I want info from the external XML file I use '$DOCUMENTNAME' for referencing the external data.