It's not really a "custom Node class" since the DTM is tabular rather than object based... but it is possible to plug in other implementations of the DTM API. See the SQL Extensions for an example, though that's a deliberately incomplete implementation of DTM for storage-efficiency reasons.
We haven't exposed a way to switch the _default_ implementation of the DTM, other than the implicit selection of SAX2DTM versus DOM2DTM based on what kind of Source object you pass into the transformer. (And perhaps XNI2DTM some time soon; I'm working on that.) We didn't anticipate a need to do so.
I'd suggest prototyping via the extension approach. If you get something interesting running, we can look at parameterizing the selection of DTMManagers and DTMs.
I looked over the SQLDocument and XConnection classes this morning -- this is exactly what I'm looking for. I see two possible solutions to my problem of wanting to get external data into XSL:
1) Re-work XConnection and SQLDocument to use a generalized interface, which in turn could be implemented wrap either the JDBC interfaces that are used now, or a custom data set
2) Write a JDBC driver to wrap my data and use the current implementation of the SQL Extension
How would you feel about #1? How much work do you think it would take? Those classes don't seem too complex so it may be a very a simple matter. (I would probably be doing the work.) Writing a JDBC driver is rather daunting, just because of the shear size of the interfaces you are required to implement.
Would a generalized SQL Extension have any use to the Xalan community?
Thanks, Toby -- Tobias McNulty Data Description, Inc. 840 Hanshaw Road, Suite 9 Ithaca, NY 14850 Phone: (607) 257-1000 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: www.datadesk.com
