XSL and namespaces

Question

Maybe I should ask this one some XML forum, but I'm using the Java 1.6 standard XSLT engine, and maybe this is its berhavior. Anyhow, what I want is the transform the XML notation of Excel and that didn't work. I've simplified it all to get to the problem. Now, I have the following XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Workbook>
<Worksheet>
  <Table>
   <Row>
    <Cell><Data Type="String">images</Data></Cell>
    <Cell><Data Type="String">articlenr</Data></Cell>
    <Cell><Data Type="String">descriptionhead</Data></Cell>
    <Cell><Data Type="String">worldwide</Data></Cell>
    <Cell><Data Type="String">sort</Data></Cell>
   </Row>
  </Table>
</Worksheet>
</Workbook>And apply the following XSLT to it:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
     <xsl:template match="/">
          <Root>
               <xsl:apply-templates/>
          </Root>
     </xsl:template>
     <xsl:template match="Row">
          <articlenr><xsl:value-of select="Cell[2]/Data"/></articlenr>
     </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>And this works fine, I get the correct output:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><Root>
   <articlenr>articlenr</articlenr>
</Root>But the actual XML is much more complex, for one it uses namespaces. So the root tag looks like:
<Workbook xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet"
xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:x="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:excel"
xmlns:ss="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet"
xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">The moment I add this to the XML the XSL no longer functions. The output becomes:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><Root>
    images
    articlenr
    descriptionhead
    worldwide
    sort
</Root>It simply does not match to the Row tag anymore and defaults to text output. It seems I can't convince XSL to match on Row when the namespaces are present.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

tbeernot wrote:
Naturally that was the first thing that I tried and it didn't work. Turns out XSLT1.0 can't handle default namespaces, so you have to used explicit namespaces on the tags. Yes, that's true. But just because Microsoft made it the default namespace in their document, doesn't mean you have to make it the default namespace in your XSL document. You could define a prefix for it:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
  xmlns:ms="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:spreadsheet">
    <xsl:template match="ms:Row">Edited by: DrClap on Dec 2, 2008 11:55 AM