I want to set a processing instruction to include a stylesheet on top of an XML:
The same issue was with the xml-declaration (e.g. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
)
Desired result:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"?>
<TestPath>
<Test>Test</Test>
<SomeMore>SomeMore</SomeMore>
</TestPath>
My research brought me to node test syntax and processing-instruction()
.
This
SELECT 'type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"' AS [processing-instruction(xml-stylesheet)]
,'Test' AS Test
,'SomeMore' AS SomeMore
FOR XML PATH('TestPath')
produces this:
<TestPath>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"?>
<Test>Test</Test>
<SomeMore>SomeMore</SomeMore>
</TestPath>
All hints I found tell me to convert the XML to VARCHAR, concatenate it "manually" and convert it back to XML. But this is - how to say - ugly?
This works obviously:
SELECT CAST(
'<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"?>
<TestPath>
<Test>Test</Test>
<SomeMore>SomeMore</SomeMore>
</TestPath>' AS XML);
Is there a chance to solve this?
There is another way, which will need two steps but don't need you to treat the XML as string anywhere in the process :
declare @result XML =
(
SELECT
'Test' AS Test,
'SomeMore' AS SomeMore
FOR XML PATH('TestPath')
)
set @result.modify('
insert <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"?>
before /*[1]
')
The XQuery expression passed to modify()
function tells SQL Server to insert the processing instruction node before the root element of the XML.
UPDATE :
Found another alternative based on the following thread : Merge the two xml fragments into one? . I personally prefer this way :
SELECT CONVERT(XML, '<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"?>'),
(
SELECT
'Test' AS Test,
'SomeMore' AS SomeMore
FOR XML PATH('TestPath')
)
FOR XML PATH('')