The upgrade of JAXP in JDK6u18 has introduced an XSLT regression which prevents us from building our project (OpenDS). I have managed to narrow down the problem to a simple test case which shows that in some circumstances the xsl:copy-of instruction does not fully copy the content of a variable containing attributes created using xsl:attribute instructions.

To reproduce:

Compile the attached Java program, BasicXsl.java, which I ripped from CR 6940416.

Run it as follows:

java -cp <classpath> BasicXsl test.xml output.xml test.xsl

The application should generate two identical elements as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<aaa name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package">
<bbb name="bbb-name">
<aaa-ref name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package"/>
</bbb>
</aaa>
<aaa name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package">
<bbb name="bbb-name">
<aaa-ref name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package"/>
</bbb>
</aaa>

This is the case for JDK6u17, Xalan-J 2.7.1, and GNOME libxslt (via xsltproc).

However with JDK6u18 and above (I have been using JDK6u20 and JDK7) the following is output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<aaa name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package">
<bbb name="bbb-name">
<aaa-ref/>
</bbb>
</aaa>
<aaa name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package">
<bbb name="bbb-name">
<aaa-ref name="aaa-name" package="aaa-package"/>
</bbb>
</aaa>

Note that the attributes are missing from the first aaa-ref element. They do not seem to be copied via the xsl:copy-of instruction.