John

learn xslt (read all 2 entries…)
XSLT rocks!!! 3 years ago

Do not let the nay-sayers stop you. XSLThas what it takes to turn complex problems involving XML inputs that get turned into different XML – or something else – trivial!

You do a small amount of work and it solves a big problem.

Filtering, sorting, grouping, transforming, reversing, substituting, converting – these are all XSLTstrong suits.

Lots of times, a conventional procedural language is not the right approach to an XSLT transformation problem. XSLTfits these situations like a glove.

The first step is learn how the XSLT template element works. Along the way, learn XPath expressions.

Read up on it and do it hands on. It does not take that long to write a short XSLT stylesheet. Sometimes the shortest ones are the most powerful. They can certainly give the most profound results. You will see when you get your first one working.

If you want to learn XSLT and you get stuck, hit me up.

My only sticking point is I will not do your school homework for you or write your project modules for you. If you want an explanation of what something in XSLT does or its purpose that is fine and I would love to help.

Dec 21, 2005, 08:41PM PST | 1 cheer


Comments:

Neckbone

New to XSLT

John,

I am trying to work with data in XML and would like to know what XSL and XSLT will do. Initially, I was just creating documentation in XML and converting with CSS for publishing. However, my boss would like to start a new project in which we can have customer interaction (forms), query the data, create labels, convert to PDF. That’s all I can think of for right now. I am limited on resources (manpower, just me) and not sure about money, if there is any. So, can XSLT do most of what I am requesting above? Please ask me more questions if you need additional details.

Thanks,

Scott

Jun 19, 2006, 09:53AM PDT | Thread | Respond to this

John

sure, XSLT has already been harnessed to do that

See if Apache FOP does what you want, as far as documentation generation goes.

If not, take a gander at the Javadoc-to-DocBook software package someone wrote. It has a doclet net extracts the Javadoc comments/info from a program into some XML format, and then converts that into DocBook. From there, you can get your documentation in any reasonable file format known to man.

For the new stuff you are interested in doing, yes – it is very possible. You can find what you need to know below.

First, take a look at the first (oldest) blog post in Extremely XSLT weblog.

It describes a project from the early 2000s that generated HTML & PDF documents from XML content – by employing a two-pass XSLT transformation.

The first pass, or phase if you prefer, converted the XML into a generic format with generalized layout/style information. The second pass then converted the generalized format into a specific one: HTML, XSL-FO (for PDF conversion), or something else for conversion into spreadsheets.

The whole project went really quickly.

Now, I think you should also read the links in the sidebar of that weblog. They will point you to all the specs and latest news on the file formats you are interested in using.

Also, check out the Mozilla Development Center since Mozilla supports virtually all of them. Everything except XSL-FO itself, in fact.

Jun 19, 2006, 02:32PM PDT | Respond to this

John

a lot of improvements were introduced in DocBook 5.0b6

If you go back and look at upgrading your documentation-publishing process sometime, assuming you are producing software documentation – you might want to look into recent enhancements made in DocBook

That version 5.0 beta 6 released they issued a couple weeks ago sounds really sweet. Read the blog entry cited above and you will see what I mean.

Jun 19, 2006, 05:11PM PDT | Respond to this


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