Problem w/ colons in form input names with cocoon-1.7dev, xalan-0.20

[Donald Ball <ba...@webslingerZ.com>]

Heya. I'm getting this error with one of my more recent experiments:

Error found handling the request.

          java.lang.NullPointerException: 
                  at org.apache.xalan.xpath.xml.QName.(QName.java:285)
                  at
org.apache.xalan.xslt.XSLTEngineImpl.setStylesheetParam(XSLTEngineImpl.java:2988)
                  at
org.apache.cocoon.transformer.XalanTransformer.transform(XalanTransformer.java:94)
                  at
org.apache.cocoon.processor.xslt.XSLTProcessor.process(XSLTProcessor.java:110)
                  at org.apache.cocoon.Engine.handle(Engine.java:295)
                  at org.apache.cocoon.Cocoon.service(Cocoon.java:145)
                  at
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:588)
                  at
org.apache.jserv.JServConnection.processRequest(JServConnection.java:314)
                  at
org.apache.jserv.JServConnection.run(JServConnection.java:188)
                  at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java)

I tracked it down to the following form variable:

SETTING PARAM: xmlform:xpath
SETTING VALUE: /page/news[title='A-R-E Seminar in Greensboro']

xalan is trying to look for the xmlform: namespace, but isn't finding one
because these form input names aren't XML elements and don't belong in XML
namespaces, they just sort of resemble them. For my app, I can manually
add an xmlform namespace to the offending stylesheet, but this may well
trip up someone else who uses colons in their form input names. Dunno what
a good solution would be offhand though... 

- donald