Yes, if the collection is held in a global variable then it's likely that
all the documents will be locked down.

If it's in a local variable the situation is more complex: if Saxon can
detect that you are doing a single iteration over the contents of the
variable, then it won't actually hold the whole sequence in memory, but in
other cases it will.

Doing <for-each select="collection($in)/discard-document(.)"> or
<apply-templates select="collection($in)/discard-document(.)"> is safest.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/ 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Carlisle [mailto:davidc@xxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 04 August 2005 15:57
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re:  Using Saxon 8.5 and collection() to 
> process a directory of XML files
> 
> 
> 
> > You can call saxon:discard-document() to make a document 
> available for
> > garbage collection when there are no outstanding references to it.
> 
> ah, thanks.
> 
> So does that  mean  that one shoudn't make a global variable
> 
>   <xsl:variable name="collection" select="collection(...
> 
>   <xsl:template name="main">
>     <xsl:for-each select="$collection/saxon:discard-document(.)" ...
> 
> 
> as that will force you to keep the document around forever in 
> case I go 
> $collection[66]/a/b/c at some strange point? Or can your stylesheet
> analysis detect that the variable is only used in a top level loop?
> 
> 
> Should I instead go
> 
> 
>   <xsl:template name="main">
>   <xsl:for-each select="collection( ...)/saxon:discard-document(.)"
> 
> 
> 
> so that outside the loop the node is not accessible (without reparsing
> the document)
> 
> David
> 
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