Saxon stops working after installing batik-rasterizer - ant

Question

Could someone please help me with the following problem?
Yesterday I was trying to add a process to my ANT script (Windows XP, ANT version 1.8.2, mostly XSLT 2.0, Saxon 9 simply added to my ant/lib) whereby it converts a directory of SVGs to PDFs using Batik's rasterizertask. Initially I had a lot of trouble getting ANT to recognize the rasterizertask but after reinstalling Batik from source and with the help of the following link I was able to get it to work.
https://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/xmlgraphics-batik-users/200605.mbox/%3C445B43B9.4010403#harcotechnology.com%3E
Though these instructions did not state to do so, I found I needed to recompile/rebuild the rasterizertask.jar.
As a side note, I had also already added the path to the batik-rasterizer.jar and rasterizertask classes to my CLASSPATH as recommended on the official Batik site.
And voila, I had the rasterizer task working. Alas, all my XSLT 2.0 tasks that followed the rasterizertask in my ANT script stopped working. From what I could tell, something I had done caused the default XSLT processor to be changed to Xalan-j. And Xalan does not support much of my XSLT.
For example, this is the error I get from Xalan (I know why I am getting this error, which is why I use Saxon):
[xslt] Processing D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\source\plmxml.xml to D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\target\step1.xml
[xslt] Loading stylesheet D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\stylesheets\step1.xsl
[xslt] D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\stylesheets\step1.xsl:10:16: Warning! Created using: Apache Software Foundation, http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j
[xslt] D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\stylesheets\step1.xsl:10:16: Warning! Created using: Apache Software Foundation, http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j
[xslt] Processing D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\target\step1.xml to D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\target\step2.xml
[xslt] Loading stylesheet D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\stylesheets\step2.xsl
[xslt] D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\stylesheets\step2.xsl:134:53: Fatal Error! java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.xpath.objects.XRTreeFrag cannot be cast to org.apache.xpath.objects.XNodeSet Cause: java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.xpath.objects.XRTreeFrag cannot be cast to org.apache.xpath.objects.XNodeSet
[xslt] Failed to process D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\target\step1.xml
BUILD FAILED
D:\workDirs\PLMXML2HeirarchalXML\build.xml:5: Fatal error during transformation
And all methods I have found and tried to force ANT to use Saxon (ie. adding Saxon to CLASSPATH, xslt/factory) seem to result in Saxon being called rather than Xalan but now I get the following error:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.setContentHandler(Unknown Source)
at net.sf.saxon.Configuration.reuseStyleParser(Configuration.java:2346)
at net.sf.saxon.PreparedStylesheet.loadStylesheetModule(PreparedStylesheet.java:261)
at net.sf.saxon.PreparedStylesheet.prepare(PreparedStylesheet.java:185)
at net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl.newTemplates(TransformerFactoryImpl.java:132)
at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.TraXLiaison.readTemplates(TraXLiaison.java:300)
at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.TraXLiaison.createTransformer(TraXLiaison.java:317)
at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.optional.TraXLiaison.transform(TraXLiaison.java:178)
at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.XSLTProcess.process(XSLTProcess.java:853)
at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.XSLTProcess.execute(XSLTProcess.java:389)
at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at org.apache.tools.ant.dispatch.DispatchUtils.execute(DispatchUtils.java:106)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:348)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:392)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:413)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeSortedTargets(Project.java:1399)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1368)
at org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(DefaultExecutor.java:41)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1251)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:811)
at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(Main.java:217)
at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.run(Launcher.java:280)
at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.main(Launcher.java:109)
So if I let Xalan do the processing, the rasterizer task still works, but my previously working XSLT does not, and if I use Saxon nothing works. I tried installing ANT 1.8.4, but I get the same results.
I have exhausted all of the resources I have found, including similar posts on this site, but all solutions seem to point to things I have already tried.
Hopefully this is enough information for someone to give me some advice or assistance.
Thanks,
Keith

Answer 1

There's a long history here of different problems in different Ant releases. (As a result, I for one have a lot of legacy Ant code using to call Saxon via the command line interface.) But I believe that with recent Ant releases, the trax factory mechanism works properly. Are you using
<xslt...>
<factory name="net.sf.saxon.TransformerFactoryImpl"/>
</xslt>
?
Trying to control which XSLT processor is used via the classpath is intrinsically failure-prone. That applies to any application, not just to Ant. And I think there are still bugs in the way Ant manipulates the classpath - or at any rate, to be more polite, behaviours that are not apparent from the documentation.