XSLT functions returning void

I just thought, whether XSLT 2.0 functions can return something like a void value.

for e.g. as we could do,

public void myfunction() {

}

in Java.

I do not think there is any syntax in XSLT which allows this declaration.

i.e., can we do something like following in XSLT.

<xsl:function name="my:testfunction" as="a-void-type">
  <!-- something here -->
</xsl:function>

I think there is no way of specifying a void type in XSLT. A function must return something. The best we could do is, that we specify the return type as, as="xs:string?". i.e., the function may return a xs:string value, or it may return nothing (i.e., an empty sequence: ()).

But if we want to return something like void from a function, we can instead implement a named template for this. i.e., something like following,

<xsl:template name="testtemplate">
  <!-- something here -->
</xsl:template> 

The named template is conceptually similar to xsl:function (both are callable modules), but there are some subtle differences as well, between them. xsl:function is a lot more loosely coupled module than the named template. The named template inherits the context from the caller, whereas the function has no access to the context information of the caller (though any piece of the context can be passed to the function as parameters).