I ran into what seems to be the infamous "failed to execute pipeline" problem with Cocoon 2.1.2 in trying to execute a simple XSLT transform.
Eliminating the transform from the pipeline and serializing directly to XML showed well formed XML going into the transform step, which was very frustrating, so I put in a logging transform. Lo and behold, the logger showed that the startDocument and endDocument SAX events were doubled up! What caused this problem is that I had set a session attribute to hold the XML document I wanted transformed, but I had set that attribute to be the DOM Document object, then used SessionAttributeGenerator to create the SAX event stream for the transformation. This should be perfectly acceptable! Problem is that the generate() method in SessionAttributeGenerator looks as follows: public void generate() throws IOException, SAXException, ProcessingException { xmlConsumer.startDocument(); if (this.elementName != null) { xmlConsumer.startElement("", this.elementName, this.elementName, new AttributesImpl()); XMLUtils.valueOf(xmlConsumer, this.attrObject); xmlConsumer.endElement("", this.elementName, this.elementName); } else { XMLUtils.valueOf(xmlConsumer, this.attrObject); } xmlConsumer.endDocument(); } The bug is evident because if the this.attrObject is set to a Document object (rather than the document root Element), the method generates a start/end document....but so does the interior code! So you get duplicate start/endDocument events generated and downstream XSLT transforms barf on the input (funny that the XML serializer doesn't much care about this duplication). Anyway, rewriting the generate() method of SessionAttributeGenerator will correct this insidious bug: public void generate() throws IOException, SAXException, ProcessingException { if( !( attrObject instanceof Document ) { xmlConsumer.startDocument(); } ...same interior code as before if( !( attrObject instanceof Document ) { xmlConsumer.endDocument(); } } Of course, also need to add: import org.w3c.dom.Document; Can one of the developers make this change for 2.1.3 and thus kill this bug once and for all? Thanks guys! Andrzej Jan Taramina Chaeron Corporation: Enterprise System Solutions http://www.chaeron.com