A method and apparatus are provided for composing XSL transformations with XML publishing views. XSL transformations are performed on XML documents defined as views of relational databases. A portion of a relational database can be exported to an XML document. An initial view query defines an XML view on the relational database and an XSLT stylesheet specifies at least one transformation. The initial view query is modified to account for an effect of the transformation and the modified view query is applied to the relational database to obtain the XML document. When the modified view query is evaluated on a relational database instance, the same XML document is obtained as would be obtained by evaluating the XSLT stylesheet on the original XML view.