use list of columns to use to drive deleting child elements from an xml file

Question

I have several sql statements that produce a list of elements that 'should' be columns in a database but are not. I wish to use these lists to drive transforming an xml file into the same minus various specific children elements that reference those columns. so for example for TABLE WO I have the list: 'NORMDATE','ORIGRATE','ORIGUNITCOST','PREVRATE','PREVUNITCOST'

I wish to transform this:

    <BASE>
<OBJECT>WO</OBJECT>
    <CHILD1>
    <NAME>ONE</NAME>
    </CHILD1>
    <CHILD1>
    <NAME>PREVUNITCOST</NAME>
    </CHILD1>
    <CHILD2>
    <REFNAME>ONE</REFNAME>
    </CHILD2>
    <CHILD2>
    <REFNAME>PREVUNITCOST</REFNAME>
    </CHILD2>
    </BASE>

into this:

    <BASE>
<OBJECT>WO</OBJECT>
    <CHILD1>
    <NAME>ONE</NAME>
    </CHILD1>
    <CHILD2>
    <REFNAME>ONE</REFNAME>
    </CHILD2>
    </BASE>

I'm not sure how to iterate this list which I have to manually prepare to do this - can someone give me a pointer or reference? I assume I use the identity pattern referenced here: [Text]How to remove elements from xml using xslt with stylesheet and xsltproc?

my IntelliJ reports this: Apache Software Foundation (Xalan XSLTC)1.0 I plan on using IntelliJ to transform the data into a usable output file which will be applied later in the target system.

I will not use this in production, but simply to prepare some data that itself will hopefully be usable in my target systems. So this is for a data preparation task.

Where is this list? Can it be hard-coded into the XSLT stylesheet? Also, does your processor support XSLT 2.0.? — michael.hor257k, Mar 03 '21 at 16:15
yes even though it is long I can format it and put in in as part of a variable or expression. I am using IntelliJ but I'm not sure what engine is in use. — kishjeff, Mar 04 '21 at 17:06
See here how to find out: https://stackoverflow.com/a/25245033/3016153 — michael.hor257k, Mar 04 '21 at 17:13
AFAIK, IntelliJ is an IDE. The real question is which processor will you be using in production. — michael.hor257k, Mar 16 '21 at 13:00
Thanks for checking back. This did not have the desired effect so I am still researching this. My results using this were not xml but a list of strings such as 0 -1 MAXADMIN 2020-05-29T13:37:09-04:00 1 — kishjeff, Apr 01 '21 at 11:05
You can see it working here: http://xsltransform.net/pP7NbAw — michael.hor257k, Apr 01 '21 at 13:54

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 16 '21 at 12:46

If you are using the Xalan-J processor, you should be able to take advantage of the EXSLT str:tokenize() extension function - for example:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:str="http://exslt.org/strings"
extension-element-prefixes="str">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

<xsl:param name="exclude-columns">NORMDATE,ORIGRATE,ORIGUNITCOST,PREVRATE,PREVUNITCOST</xsl:param>

<xsl:template match="/BASE">
    <xsl:copy>
        <xsl:copy-of select="*[not(REFNAME = str:tokenize($exclude-columns, ','))]"/>
    </xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Note that the above assumes all CHILDn elements use a REFNAME element to reference the column. In your example, some use REFNAME and some use NAME.

use list of columns to use to drive deleting child elements from an xml file

1 Answers1