The way extension functions work is entirely a matter for the processor, but
I would be rather surprised if the call mechanism allowed you to return a
string containing lexical XML, and implicitly parsed that XML and turned it
into a tree of nodes. That conversion needs to be done explicitly by calling
an XML parser, either from the C# before returning from the extension, or
from the XSLT code after returning.

Regards,

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

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Newman [mailto:brian.newman@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 15 December 2009 20:04
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  extension functions returning temporary trees
> 
> I'm trying to return the string "<root>test</root>" from a 
> .NET extension written in C# to the Altova XML engine running 
> XSLT 2.0.
> What actually gets returned replaces the "<" with "& l t ;" 
> (without the spaces) and similarly for ">".  This, of course, 
> means that XSLT 2.0 can't implicitly convert the returned 
> value to a temporary tree.
> 
> Has anyone else seen this problem and, if so, how have they fixed it?
> 
> Your help is much appreciated, I've been banging my head 
> against the wall over this for the past several days.