Saxon » SaxonJS

Note, incase it isn't clear: the XDM data model used in XSLT allows a document node to have multiple element and text node children. That means we have to represent it normally using a DOM DocumentFragment rather than Document object. But if the static type of a variable is declared as document-node(element(X)) then we know that it should be possible to represent it as a DOM Document. Of course we need to make sure that there is sanitary error handling if it's declared as document-node(element(X)) and the code then tries to create multiple element or text node children.

I don't think anything much is going to be changed in the Saxon-JS code on the 1.x branch; but maybe more will be done for 2.0, if we think of anything worthwhile.

It would be good to add a note in the Saxon-JS documentation. In the JS/XDM type conversion section, we currently just say that XDM nodes are converted to DOM nodes. But it may be useful to explain that XDM document nodes are usually converted to DOM DocumentFragment objects rather than DOM Document objects. These can always be converted on the JavaScript side by the user if necessary, using something like:

if (item instanceof DocumentFragment) {
   var docNode = document.implementation.createDocument(null, null, null);
   var n = docNode.importNode(item, true);
   docNode.appendChild(n);
   return docNode;
}

To fix the problem I had with XMLHttpRequests, I think we should update the specification for HTTP request maps supplied to ixsl:schedule-action/@http-request, to clarify that $request?body must be a document node (the documentation currently says any item is allowed); with a check in the JS code to throw a sensible error if it is not (at the moment the XMLHttpRequest may just crash out with an internal error).