Apply-templates are applied on “match” (that is if you don’t have a “mode” in there).

Say several templates are matching the node you select when you apply-templates all of them will execute … In the example in this post all templates will match and execute but on different part of the node set I select in the apply-templates.

I hope that makes some sense. XSLT is so powerful and a must understand for any BizTalk developer. It’s however very “different” …

One thing I find somewhat confusing is how & when the different apply-templates are executed (in sequence or “parallel” somehow or…?).

I would be grateful if somebody could explain what is being executed when (and why this is so)? Maybe a short step-by-step walkthrough

Thanks in advance.

/ Mick

I misunderstood a couple of thing. In your first comment I didn’t get that you actually meant defining a schema without a XML namespace. Then I said that a schema without a XML namespace is useless to BizTalk which of course is wrong. I should have phrased that differently.

Anyway. Great comment. Thanks. I’ve posted an “update” to this post here: http://www.richardhallgren.com/removing-xml-namespaces-revisit/

That’s odd because I’ve been using BizTalk Server for the past ten years (yes, 10 years) and several of our trading partners still running BizTalk Server 2002 and 2004 require the use of XML 1.0 documents that do NOT use namespaces, namespace prefixes or even the xml declaration.

For example, this is a perfectly acceptable XML 1.0 document:

1234567

And BizTalk Server 2006 can certainly be made to parse and serialize xml documents like this. BizTalk does NOT require the use of a namespace although by default the XML parser uses the namespace and root node name to identify an inbound document. If the namespace is missing, the root node name must be unique in the deployed schema assembly.

I’d be happy to send you a copy of a current BizTalk Server 2006 R2 solution that both parses and serializes xml documents like this all the time. In fact, I’ve processed thousands and thousands of such documents in just the past twelve months alone.

Setting the elementFormDefault attribute tells XSD that all globally declared elements (root node) has to live inside of a namespace (prefix or default). Locally declared element however don’t have to exists within a namespace. There isn’t built-in functionality to totally strip a message of it’s namespace as this generally speaking is wrong - if you have a language on the receiving side that understands XML and have a correct implementation of XML, XML namespaces isn’t a problem. Totally removing XML namespace would also make the XML message useless to BizTalk as BizTalk (as you know) uses the namespace in combination with the name of the root node to actually understand what kind of message it is.

Hope that explains it and sorry for pointing out a couple of obvious things.

I usually recommend this article when it comes to XML namespaces: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/srivastava_namespaces.html
Also make sure yo don’t miss Johans solution using streaming, you’ll find it here: http://blogical.se/blogs/johan/archive/2008/01/07/removing-xml-namespace-in-a-pipeline-component.aspx