Static Validation of XSL Transformations

Abstract

XSL Transformations (XSLT) is a programming language for defining transformations between XML languages. The structure of these languages is formally described by schemas, for example using DTD, which allows individual documents to be validated. However, existing XSLT tools offer no static guarantees that, under the assumption that the input is valid relative to the input schema, the output of the transformation is valid relative to the output schema.

We present a validation technique for XSLT based on the summary graph formalism introduced in the static analysis of JWIG Web services. Being able to provide static guarantees, we can detect a large class of errors in an XSLT stylesheet at the time it is written instead of later when it has been deployed, and thereby provide benefits similar to those of static type checkers for modern programming languages.

Our analysis takes a pragmatic approach that focuses its precision on the essential language features but still handles the entire XSLT 1.0 language. We evaluate the analysis precision on a range of real stylesheets and demonstrate how it may be useful in practice.