Validation Scenario

A complex XML document is split in smaller interrelated modules. These modules do not make much sense individually and cannot be validated in isolation due to interdependencies with other modules. Oxygen XML Editor validates the main module of the document when an imported module is checked for errors.

A typical example is the chunking DocBook XSL stylesheet which has chunk.xsl as the main module and param.xsl, chunk-common.xsl, and chunk-code.xsl as imported modules. param.xsl only defines XSLT parameters. The module chunk-common.xsl defines an XSLT template with the name chunk. Chunk-code.xsl calls this template. The parameters defined in param.xsl are used in the other modules without being redefined.

Validating chunk-code.xsl as an individual XSLT stylesheet generates misleading errors referring to parameters and templates used but undefined. These errors are only caused by ignoring the context in which this module is used in real XSLT transformations and in which it is validated. To validate such a module, define a validation scenario to set the main module of the stylesheet and the validation engine used to find the errors. Usually this engine applies the transformation during the validation process to detect the errors that the transformation generates.

You can validate a stylesheet with several engines to make sure that you can use it in different environments and have the same results. For example an XSLT stylesheet is applied with Saxon 6.5, Xalan and MSXML 4.0 in different production systems.