Article:		XSLT Reflection
Subject:		Real Reflection ?
Date:		2003-11-06 01:21:34
From:		Franck Guillaud
Well, I see a difference between Reflection in XSLT and Reflection in LISP (for instance): you can't use this reflection property in a single pass transformation. We have no "eval($xslcode)" nor any way to dynamically create anonymous template. LISP has lambda functions and such, which allow to eval LISP code dynamically.

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• Real Reflection ?
  2005-12-07 07:22:20 jaypeevoss [Reply]
  
  You may want to check out my XSLT reflection extension package for Xalan (named "Nalax") at
  http://nalax.sourceforge.net. It is pretty fresh, so the quality is still pre-beta, but I'll try to stabilize it as quickly as possible (because I need it for a different project myself).

  
  Regards,
  Jens
  
  

• Real Reflection ?
  2003-11-07 13:07:45 James Fuller [Reply]
  
  there was some discussion about including an eval type definition in exslt at some point, but this never stuck...with the dyn:evaluate function being applied to the common scenario of manually building up an evaluating an XPATH statement.

  
  reflection is a powerful concept, I dont need to statically bind my definition of it to an eval() function. All of its concepts are possible ( and facilitated with XSLT 2.0 ) through chaining transformations together.
  
  

• Real Reflection ?
  2003-11-06 04:04:21 Oleg Tkachenko [Reply]
  
  Well, first of all reflection is only reflection, and not necessarily includes on-the-fly code generation.
  Anyway some sort of such is available via dyn:evaluate EXSLT extension function, which allows to evaluate dynamically generated XPath expressions, but AFAIK XSL WG decided not to include such functionality to XSLT/XPath 2.0 edition to keep XSLT strongly compiled language.