Changing The Root Node In A ColdFusion XML Document Using XSLT

The other day, I answered a reader's question on changing the name of an XML root node. I demonstrated how to do this using string parsing and how to do it using XML manipulation. In the comments, Matthew suggested that I could use XSLT to do this as well. His example hard-coded the attribute names, so I wanted to demonstrate how to use XSLT to change the root name and dynamically copy all attributes of the root node as well. Plus, to be honest, my XSLT is getting pretty rusty, so this was a great opportunity to dust of the old brain.

In the above example, I set a variable at the top of the XSLT definition. This variable holds the name of the new root node. Then, I match the root node in the only template and create an element with the new name (using dynamic curly-brace evaluation to set the name value). I then loop over each attribute in the root node and create a copy of it in my new element. Then, I simply use the copy-of element to get a deep copy of all the children.

When we run the above code, we get the following CFDump output:

I guess this post was more for my benefit as I just wanted to use it as an excuse to practice my XML transformations. The XSLT tag set is so different that the ColdFusion / HTML tags that I'm used to using that if I don't practice from time to time, it all goes away. Heck, even with this post, the majority of the time was spent flipping back and forth from the XSLT documentation to get the syntax right.

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