XSL That Returns the XML unchanged

Question

I am looking for a XSL snippet that simply returns the XML unaltered. It sounds trivial but I can\'t seem to find an example anywhere on the web. Any help out there?

Answer 1

In order to copy the complete XML document, it is necessary to have a template that matches the root. This might be:

     

or

     

Then a single copying of the current node (the root node) is just sufficient:

      select="."/>

So, one such complete transformation is:

Although this is probably the simplest such transformation, XSLT programmers use another one, widely known as the identity transformation or the identity rule:

The reson the identity transformation is considered to be one the most fundamental XSLT design patterns and to be so massively used, is that by overriding this template rule with other, more specific templates, one can very easily perform a variety of operations that otherwise will be difficult. Examples are deleting a particular (set of) element(s) that have a specific name or satisfy some other condition, renaming particular elements, changing the namespace of particular elements, creating new children or siblings of particular elements, ..., etc.

For more information and code snippets using the identity transformation, do look here.