Steve Clay wrote:
I've been struggling with this too. I have some xml which I want to display
in a browser, having transformed it to html using xslt. The stylesheet needs
to select just some of the data: which data exactly is known only at runtime.
So ideally I'd like to pass a parameter on the url like you can do with html
pages:
(a) html like this: "http://somewhere/myhtmlpage.htm?some-param.
That only "works" in the sense that it implies that a resource known locally
as "/myhtmlpage.htm" on host "somewhere" might be accessible via HTTP on port
80, and you know that according to protocol, the HTTP server is going to make
"some-param" available to whatever is processing the request. It's still up to
the CGI app or PHP engine or whatever to make use of that info; the semantics
of "some-param" are not built-in to the HTTP protocol or the URI syntax. That
is, the fact that it might be URL-encoded HTML form data is not implicit. It's
simply the query-part of the Request-URI, just a string.
(b) xml like this?: "file:///c:\path\filename.xml?some-param
The 'file' URI scheme has no implicit protocol; it's meaning is OS-dependent.
There's nothing stopping an OS from doing something with some-param, but it
would be quite a leap to say "it means dissect and pass some-param as
top-level params to the stylesheet(s) indicated in xml-stylesheet PIs in
filename.xml".
I have managed to do this by 1) having a real html file with a body
consisting of a single <div/> element, (2) loading the xml file, (3) creating
a new node, (4) extracting the url parameter using the javascript
"document.location.search.substring(1);", (5) setting the new node's value to
this parameter and finally (5) loading the xslt, which can now access the
node I just added and use it to select just the data required before
assigning it to the <div> element in the body of the page. Phew! Is there an
easier and more elegant way?
I am 99% sure there are examples on the msdn.microsoft.com site that explain
how to invoke MSXML from code. You load up an HTML page that contains VBScript
or JavaScript that invokes the transformation, possibly passing in parameters.
Presumably the browser makes available the URL for the script to dissect? If
it doesn't, then you'll have to do the transformation on the server. There's
only so much the client can do. Interpreting query data in URLs is the
server's job. But I'm just guessing. It didn't take long to find the relevant
part of the MSXML SDK documentation on the MSDN site...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xmlsdk/htm/xsl_advanced1_82yb.asp
On this topic Jarno.Elovirta said "Top-level xsl:param element with the same
name." I wondered if this meant I could just put "<?xml-stylesheet
type="text/xsl" href="Data.xslt"?> at the top of my xml file and load it in
Explorer using something like (b) above but if I have a stylesheet with a
parameter element at the top level MXSML v4.0 just says "Keyword
xsl:stylesheet may not contain xsl:parameter." So, I'm sorry Jarno but I
don't understand what you meant.
Well, for one thing, he said xsl:param, not xsl:parameter. Perhaps you did
type xsl:param and just forgot to use the XSLT 1.0 namespace instead of the 4
year old, never-approved WD-XSL namespace that Microsoft won't let die?
Anyway, he was saying that you import the parameter in to the stylesheet
by using xsl:param at the top level.
<xsl:stylesheet...>
<xsl:param name="foo"/>
<xsl:template...>
...and so on. $foo can be used in XPath expressions therein. The trick is to
tell the XSLT processor, MSXML in your case, to set foo, since it doesn't do
you any good to import a parameter that hasn't been set (it'll just default to
an empty string).
For better answers to MSXML specific questions, ask on one of the
microsoft.public newsgroups.
- Mike
____________________________________________________________________________
mike j. brown | xml/xslt: http://skew.org/xml/
denver/boulder, colorado, usa | resume: http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
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