I know that the OP meant something completely different, but probably
what seems as an appropriate  answer to the question expressed in the
title of this thread is:

   the builtin rules.

It is a good practice to have them explicitly in one's code (with the
least priority possible) and to put breakpoints on them (in a good
XSLT IDE with a debugger), whenever one gets unexpected output that no
other template is supposed to produce.

I find this meaning of "catch all" more natural and intuitive.


Cheers,
Dimitre Novatchev.

 


On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 08:03:06 -0700, Karl Stubsjoen <kstubs@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'd like a catch ALL template rule, actually a catch NOT template
> rule.  In an effort to check for the existence of a select, I have
> setup a match template rule that simply returns "1" for a match.  So I
> have:
> 
> <xsl:template match="record" mode="recordexists">
> <xsl:text>1</xsl:text>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> The failed select would need to return a "0".  So I need a match that
> simply returns 0.
> 
> So something like:
> 
> <xsl:template match="not(record)" mode="recordexists">
> <xsl:text>0</xsl:text>
> </xsl:template>
> 
> (which is not a legal match statement, but that is what I need).  I'm
> sure there is a way, and I'm sure it is obvious!  Just not coming to
> me.
> 
> Thanks,
> Karl