Something I did not realise about xsl and apply-templates

I love xsl. And I used to love apply-templates. Until today.
I always thought that apply when you have and xml that looks like this:

<a>
  <b>
    <b/>
  </b>
  <c>
   <b/>
  </c>
  <d>
   <b/>
 </d>
</a>

Then you could use apply templates to select all the children of a -

<xsl:apply-templates select="a/*">
</xsl:apply-templates >

And have the templates you need to process all the nodes -

<xsl:template match="b">
<B_Processed/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="c">
<C_Processed/>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="d">
<D_Processed/>
</xsl:template>

Running this would on the provided example will generate, as expected -

<B_Processed/>
<C_Processed/>
<D_Processed/>

The behaviour I did not expect is what happens when the match encounters an unfamiliar node, so if your xml looks like this -

<a>
  <b>
    <b/>
  </b>
  <c>
   <b/>
  </c>
  <d>
   <b/>
 </d>
 <e>
   <b/>
 </e>
</a>

Notice the added <e> tag to which there isn't a template.

The output of the xsl with this input is:

<B_Processed />
<C_Processed />
<D_Processed />
<B_Processed />

Noticed that last B_Processed?

Apparently the xsl match process behaviour is that if it encounters an element in the select (the one you've specifically specified in the apply-templates) that does not have a match it will drill into that node recursively until it does find a match.

In my example <e> is unknown, but it's child <b> has a template which then gets executed.

In my world of using xsl to process xml messages this is a big disadvantage, as it means that in a way I might get unexpected results if I don't cover absolutely every option in the tempales.

For instance - if I need to filter out irrelevant elements from a message, I can't just specify the ones I need, I have to specify all the ones that might occur and I don't need as well, because otherwise they might include, internally, an element to which I have a template, although I never planned to apply it in that level.

I can pretty much state now that I will not be using apply-templates any more! Not unless I know exactly what I'm getting (and that it will never change) - which is pretty much never.