Saxon

Sorry for the delay in responding.

The way in which saxon:next-in-chain works has changed significantly in 9.6, and the implementation for principal result documents is rather different from the implementation for xsl:result-document.

For the principal document, the s9api XsltTransformer asks the stylesheet for details of the xsl:output options, and if next-in-chain is present then it sets up the Destination of the transformer to be another transformer. It is this second transformer that is complaining if the first transformation fails to produce a result tree; though as you observe, this is in fact quite legitimate if a secondary result document has been produced. For this one, I'm simply going to remove the message, even though there may be cases where this causes an difficult-to-explain lack of output.

I haven't managed to reproduce the problem with character maps: I created a test and it's working fine, both with and without a result-document instruction.

I'm not sure how much time it's worth spending on this, given that I can find a workaround (basically, not using saxon:next-in-chain for this particular transformation scenario), but I'm attaching a zipfile containing the code/data environment in which Saxon 9.5 succeeds and Saxon 9.6 fails.

From the directory containing the XSLT, run a transform like

saxon -xsl:Split-publs.xsl -s:In -o:Out

(Split-publs.xsl chainsn Split-publs-2.xsl)

When I try it, Saxon 9.5 succeeds and generates 184 output docs in Out; 9.6 fails with

Error at xsl:if on line 535 of Split-publs.xsl:
  SEPM0016: Character map 'specialChar' has not been defined

but the xsl:character-map element is in the chained transform, not Split-publs.xsl. The primary transform runs fine in 9.6 if the saxon:next-in-chain instruction is suppressed.

Apologies in advance for the baroque nature of the XSLT code.

Thanks. This was a fairly simple bug: while processing next-in-chain within the first stylesheet, a serializer is created for the second stylesheet to use, and this was being created with the character maps from the first stylesheet instead of the second. Patched in the 9.6 and 9.7 branches.

(As it happens, getting this to work on the 9.7 branch revealed some other bugs, but you don't want to know about those...)

Bug fix applied in the Saxon 9.6.0.5 maintenance release.