XSLT: apply a template to a tree fragment - xslt

Question

I have defined a variable $NodeVariable,
for instance:
<xsl:variable name="NodeVariable">
<aT>
<aT2>foo</aT2>
<aT3>bar</aT3>
</aT>
</xsl:variable>
and in different parts of the code I want to "apply"
different templates to myVariable.
Unfortunately,
I don't know what's the syntax for this.
I've tried the following:
<xsl:for-each select="$NodeVariable">
<xsl:call-template name="ns:ExtractInfo1"/>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:copy-of select="$NodeVariable">
<xsl:call-template name="ns:ExtractInfo2"/>
</xsl:for-each>
<xsl:copy-of select="$NodeVariable">
<xsl:call-template name="ns:ExtractInfo3"/>
</xsl:for-each>
which doesn't work.
How to apply a template to a tree fragment?

Answer 1

Assuming you use an XSLT 1.0 processor, you need to convert the result tree fragment to a node set first:
<xsl:variable name="NodeVariable">
<aT>
<aT2>foo</aT2>
<aT3>bar</aT3>
</aT>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="NodeSet" select="exsl:node-set($NodeVariable)"/>
(where the stylesheet declares xmlns:exsl="http://exslt.org/common"), then you can apply-templates in different modes as needed e.g.
<xsl:apply-templates select="$NodeSet/aT" mode="m1"/>
and write templates for that mode e.g.
<xsl:template match="aT" mode="m1">
<xsl:value-of select="aT2"/>
</xsl:template>
Of course if you really want to call named templates you could do that as well, but using apply-templates and modes for different processing steps is the preferred way in XSLT in my view.