configure Saxon in eXist-db 5+ for xinclude - saxon

Question

As of version 5.0 eXist-db no longer supports dynamically passing the option expand-xincludes=no to the Saxon processor during serialization. As such, I have to configure this in a Saxon config file. However this configuration does not seem to work - the xincludes are still being expanded in output.
Steps:
Following this comment and Saxon docs I created a configuration file called saxon-config.xml with the #xInclude="false" parameter:
<configuration xmlns="http://saxon.sf.net/ns/configuration" edition="HE">
<global xInclude="false"/>
</configuration>
I saved this in eXist's /etc/ directory and pointed to this file in the attribute in eXist's conf.xml:
<transformer class="net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl" caching="no">
<attribute name="http://saxon.sf.net/feature/version-warning" value="false" type="boolean"/>
<attribute name="http://saxon.sf.net/feature/configuration-file" value="/Applications/eXist-db-5.2/etc/saxon-config.xml" type="string"/>
</transformer>
Yet the serializer still expands all the xincludes on output.
As a test to see if Saxon is reading the config, I put a deliberate error in the Saxon config file and Saxon objected.
Have I configured this for xInclude correctly?
--- adding more about workflow ---
Serialization in eXist 5.0 is performed in Xquery with the function fn:serialize().
I obtain a node (testing shows that this action does not expand xi:includes automatically in eXist) = $mydoc
I pass the node to the function with certain parameters, for example
fn:serialize($mydoc, map {"indent":true(),"method":"xml", "omit-xml-declaration":false()})
Output has expanded xinclude

Answer 1

I noticed this message on a recent mailing list, perhaps it's relevant.
My reading of this is that it's eXist doing the serialization with XInclude expansion, and this has nothing to do with Saxon. This doesn't solve your problem but hopefully it means you will be able to look in the right place for a solution; nothing you do with Saxon configuration options is going to make any difference.
Hi Ihe,
See the eXist documentation on XInclude, particularly the section on error handling:
https://exist-db.org/exist/apps/doc/xinclude
Joe
On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 7:50 AM Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka#gmail.com> wrote:
5.2.0
On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 6:31 AM Jean-Paul Rehr <rehrjb#gmail.com> wrote:
Which version of eXist? Prior to 5.0 you can use
declare option exist:serialize "expand-xincludes=no";
in your Xquery declarations to allow/disallow Xinclude expansion (assuming you are using Xquery to execute the transformation). After 5.0...this no longer has an effect. Hopefully it will be reintroduced or another method discovered (see https://github.com/eXist-db/exist/issues/3446).
On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 11:12 AM Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka#gmail.com> wrote:
A short while ago I wrote a transform that was supposed to transform a certain input element to an Xinclude element.
eXist blew up because it tried to resolve Xinclude call as soon as I attempted to store the transformation in the database.
Is that supposed to happen? Including the xsl list because am wondering whether this was a use case for namespace aliasing.
I have since solved the problem another way so the question is of academic interest only.
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