AW: [xml] Catalogs and relative paths

["Zlatkovic, Igor" <Igor Zlatkovic Dresdner-Bank com>]

> I'm currently trying to write a Python/XML-based website 
> generation program 
> using the libxml2/libxslt Python bindings; as part of this I 
> need to do some 
> sort of URL mapping for source documents, for instance converting 
> http://wwwsource/foo to file:///home/smcv/websource/foo.xml. 
> (This lets me 
> use relative paths starting with / in a convenient way, 
> without hard-coding 
> my working directory into the site's source.)

A parh starting with '/' is not relative per definition. If you are using
relative paths across your whole application, then it does not depend on
your working directory in any way.

> The catalog mechanism seems like the mechanism I'm after, but 
> relative paths 
> don't seem to be treated in the way I'd expect; I'd like to 
> check whether 
> this is a bug or a feature before I start trying to fix it :-)
>
> As a test case, I have the following document:
>
>       <doc xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude";>
>       <txt>This is the correct test.xml.</txt>
>       <xi:include href="include.xml"/>
>       </doc>
>
> I place this in rewrite/really-test.xml under my web server 
> root, set up an 
> XML catalog mapping from http://localhost/virtual/test.xml to 
> http://localhost/rewrite/really-test.xml, and do
>       xsltproc null.xslt http://localhost/virtual/test.xml
> where null.xslt is a stylesheet that just prints out text 
> nodes. As expected, 
> this outputs "This is the correct test.xml". So far so good.
>
> I then add --xinclude to the command line, hoping to get the text of 
> http://localhost/virtual/include.xml. Instead, I get the text of 
> http://localhost/rewrite/include.xml, i.e. the relative URI 
> is looked up 
> relative to the final location of the document, rather than 
> relative to the 
> location I first asked for.
>
> Is this the intended behaviour of the base path when used 
> with catalogs, or is 
> this a bug?

What does the catalog you are using look like? 

Ciao,
Igor