I have some quite-large tables that i use for lookups (categories, mostly, and prices). They fit pretty nicely in a DOM in memory, no problem, and they almost never change.
Now, I want to access those from XSLT as a variable.
Normally, I would aggregate the source, and pass it in the input to the processor, and then do the lookup when I need to.
Big waste of time, though, because normally (in Java) I'd parse the XML into a DOM (once) and pass it to the XSLT as a parameter (kind of like using the "document" function).
Is there something like that in Cocoon (allow to pass a full DOM as a parameter to the XSLT processor) or shall I start coding?
Pier
Something you could do that would be usefull for accessing XML databases with DOM interface also (Xindice e.g. IIRC), would be to extend o.a.excalibur.xml.xslt.XSLTProcessorImpl, so that it become DOM aware.
What needs to be changed is the resolve(String href, String base) method (that is used for handling document(), xsl:include and xsl:import). Now it takes a href, finds a Source and transforms it to a javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource. Instead one can start by checking if the Source implements javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource, (or DOMizable if we would like to make it analogous to XMLizable), if it does it is just returned from resolve directly.
A similar extension is needed for the transform method so that it also becomes DOMSource aware.
Then you just creates a source like e.g. XModuleSource that implements DOMSource and finds and return your DOM from somewhere.
AFAIK neither Saxon or Xalan is as efficient with a DOMSource as with their internal specalized XML tree representation. But it should be much more efficient than to serialize your DOM and build the internal representation.
/Daniel
