How to generate a GUID in XSLT transformations

A recent task involved migrating tens of jobs from Control M to VisualCron. I 'm never in the mood for manual repetitive tasks, so the approach was taken to do it with XSLT, since both Control M and VisualCron support XML config schemas.

VisualCron expects various Ids to be GUIDs, and XSL has no built-in functionality to generate GUIDs, so a plan had to be made. I queried Google and found that one can write extension objects in C# and use them during the translation.

The code for to generate a GUID is very simple:

    public class TransformUtils

    {

        public string GenerateGuid()

        {

            return Guid.NewGuid().ToString();

        }

    }

This is then plugged into the transformation code like this:

            string xmlPath = txtXMLSource.Text;

            string xslPath = txtXSLSource.Text;

            StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();

            

            XsltArgumentList arguments = new XsltArgumentList();

            arguments.AddExtensionObject("EPS:TransformUtils", new TransformUtils());

            

            using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter(output))

            {

                XslCompiledTransform transform = new XslCompiledTransform();

                transform.Load(xslPath);

                transform.Transform(xmlPath, arguments, writer);

            }

Inside the xslt stylesheet the extension function can now be called:

<xsl:value-of select="TransformUtils:GenerateGuid()" />

I found a good sample and guide here