Bug in Oracle XML Parser?

Question

I have run the same .xsql page using the same .xsl style sheet via URL/Browser and programmatically as referenced in Steve's book. The problem is, the .xsql runs fine via the browser; however, if I call that same file programmatically I get this:
*** Oracle XSQL Programmatic Page Processor 1.0.4.1 (Production)
XSQL-005: XSQL page is not well-formed.
XML parse error at line 5, char 10
End tag does not match start tag 'META'. ***
Now I've validated the .xsl using 3 different XML editors including JDeveloper. All return the file as well-formed. By the way, there are no META tags in the style sheet or the xsql page! Bug?
Regards,
Craig
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Answer 1

What happening here is the following:
When you run through the browser, the http request invokes the XSQL Servlet, the XSQL page template is found (typically in the cache if it's the 2nd or subsequent time you're asking for the page), and then the result is returned. Everything fine.
When you run through the XSQLRequest class, you are providing a URL to the "raw" XSQL page of "http://foo/bar.xsql". The XSQL Page processor fetches what it's expecting to be the "raw" template XSQL page by retrieving the resource at the given URL. However, since the URL ends with *.xsql, the request for the *.xsql file does NOT return the raw XSQL page template that the XSQLRequest class is expecting, but instead the server processes the template on the server side and returns the result of processing the bar.xsql page to the XSQLRequest class. Since apparently your XSLT stylesheet if producing HTML, what the XSQLRequest class sees for the "raw" XSQL page template is actually the resulting HTML produced by the web server and since this is not wellformed XML, it gives this error.
The solution, either provide the URL to the bar.xsql page as a file URL, or change the extension on the template page to any extension other than *.xsql so that the template won't get processed by the web server before its delivered.