How to restrict which nodes produce output in stylesheet - templates

Question

I am working on a transform. The goal is to transform nodes into key/value pairs. Found a great stylesheet recommendation on this forum but I could use some help to tweak it a bit. For any node that has no children, the node name should become the value of <name> and the value should become the value of <value>. The source document may have some hierarchical structure to it, but I want to ignore that and only return the bottom nodes, transformed of course.
Here is my source data:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<objects>
<Technical_Spec__c>
<Id>a0e30000000vFmbAAE</Id>
<F247__c>4.0</F247__c>
<F248__c xsi:nil="true"/>
<F273__c>Bronx</F273__c>
...
</Technical_Spec__c>
</objects>
Here is the stylesheet:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="*[count(*) = 0]">
<item>
<name>
<xsl:value-of select="name(.)" />
</name>
<value>
<xsl:value-of select="." />
</value>
</item>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="*[count(*) > 0]">
<items>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</items>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
DESIRED OUTPUT - The stylesheet should transform these nodes to key value pairs like this:
<items>
<item>
<name>F247__c</name>
<value>4.0</value>
</item>
<item>
<name>F248__c</name>
<value></value>
</item>
<item>
<name>F273__c</name>
<value>Bronx</value>
</item>
...
</items>
CURRENT OUTPUT - But it creates nested 'items' elements like this:
<items>
<items>
<item><name></name><value></value></item>
...
</items>
</items>
I understand (I think) that it is matching all the parent nodes including the top node 'objects' and nesting the 'matches count 0' template. So I tried altering the matches attribute to exclude 'objects' and start at 'Technical_Spec__c' like this (just the template lines):
<xsl:template match="objects/Technical_Spec__c/*">
<xsl:template match="*[count(*) = 0]">
<xsl:template match="objects/*[count(*) > 0]">
In my mind this says "First (master) template only matches nodes with parents 'objects/Tech_Spec'. Second (inner) template matches any node with no children. Third (outer) template matches nodes with parent 'objects' " - which should limit me to one .
OUTPUT AFTER ALTERING MATCH - Here is what I get:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
- <items xmlns=""><?xml version="1.0"?>
<item><name>Id</name><value>a0e30000000vFmbAAE</value></item>
<item><name>F247__c</name><value>4.0</value></item>
...
</items>
The extra <items> block is gone but there is an extra <?xml> block stuck in the middle so it's not recognized as valid xml anymore.
Any ideas? Why the extra <?xml>; How to restrict template to particular parts of the tree?

Answer 1

Through a great deal of trial and error, I stumbled on the following solution: I added a root anchor to the third template match criteria.
Instead of match="*[count(*) > 0]", I now have /*[count(*) > 0]. This appears to eliminate the outer <items> element. If anyone can tell me why, I'd appreciate it. Why would this be different than /objects/*[count(*) > 0] ?
I do think Dimitre is right about the processor (which is IBM Cast Iron) so I did open a ticket. I tested the same stylesheet from above on an online XSLT tester and did not get the extra <?xml ?> tag.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="*[count(*) = 0]">
<item>
<name>
<xsl:value-of select="name(.)" />
</name>
<value>
<xsl:value-of select="." />
</value>
</item>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="/*[count(*) > 0]">
<items>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</items>