Saxon Documentation

Full Contents

About Saxon

Changes in this Release

Conditions of Use

Using XSLT 2.0

Using XQuery

Handling Source Documents

XML Schema Processing

XPath API for Java

Saxon on .NET

Extensibility

Saxon Extensions

Sample Saxon Applications

The Saxon SQL Extension

XSLT Elements
	Introduction
	xsl:analyze-string
	xsl:apply-imports
	xsl:apply-templates
	xsl:attribute
	xsl:attribute-set
	xsl:call-template
	xsl:character-map
	xsl:choose
	xsl:comment
	xsl:copy
	xsl:copy-of
	xsl:decimal-format
	xsl:document
»	xsl:element
	xsl:fallback
	xsl:for-each
	xsl:for-each-group
	xsl:function
	xsl:if
	xsl:include
	xsl:import
	xsl:import-schema
	xsl:key
	xsl:matching-substring
	xsl:message
	xsl:namespace
	xsl:namespace-alias
	xsl:next-match
	xsl:non-matching-substring
	xsl:number
	xsl:otherwise
	xsl:output
	xsl:output-character
	xsl:param
	xsl:perform-sort
	xsl:preserve-space
	xsl:processing-instruction
	xsl:result-document
	xsl:sequence
	xsl:sort
	xsl:strip-space
	xsl:stylesheet
	xsl:template
	xsl:text
	xsl:value-of
	xsl:variable
	xsl:when
	xsl:with-param
	Literal Result Elements
	XSLT Patterns

XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax

Function Library

Standards Conformance

xsl:element

The xsl:element instruction is used to create an output element whose name might be calculated at run-time.

The element has a mandatory attribute, name, which is the name of the generated element. The name attribute is an attribute value template, so it may contain string expressions inside curly braces.

The attributes of the generated element are defined by subsequent xsl:attribute elements. The content of the generated element is whatever is generated between the <xsl:element> and </xsl:element> tags.

Additionally, attributes of the generated element can be defined by reference to a named attribute set. The optional use-attribute-sets attribute contains a white-space-separated list of attribute set names. They are applied in the order given: if the same attribute is generated more than once, the later value always takes precedence.

For example, the following code creates a <FONT> element with several attributes:

<xsl:element name="FONT">
    <xsl:attribute name="SIZE">4</xsl:attribute>
    <xsl:attribute name="FACE">Courier New</xsl:attribute>
Some output text
</xsl:element>

A new attribute type-annotation is available in XSLT 2.0. This indicates the data type of the value of the element. In Saxon 7.3, the value must be a built-in type defined in XML Schema, for example xs:integer or xs:date. Type annotations are only accessible if the attribute is added to a temporary tree that specifies type-information="preserve". The value given to the element must be a string that conforms to the rules for the data type, as defined in XML Schema. In particular this means that the element must not have any element children.