Hi Barry,
My main concern with XSLT 2.0 is how well it can be maintained by
someone else on the project team. With XSLT 1.0 we could just get the
newcomers to buy Mr. Kay's book.
Dr. Kay also has an XSLT 2.0 book that can be preordered from Amazon
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764569090/qid=1086468757/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-3934922-7293706?v=glance&s=books).
Its obviously not available now so if your consideration is for the short
term then this obviously doesn't help. If its for the long term though
you're good to go.
The HTML documentation that comes with
Saxon is a good reference but is not a tutorial. This is an argument
for using JavaScript - its easier to understand and modify for a VB
programmer than XSL.
Being someone who has gone through the mental transition from procedural to
declarative/functional styled programming I can assure you that, while it
does take some effort, its not as big of a deal to make the transition as
people think it is. The upside is enormous and the effort fairly minimal.
Its DEFINITELY worth the effort. With that said...
The other consideration for a long term solution would be XQuery which gives
the syntax procedural developers are used to while acting as an excellent
way to easily query the XML data and process strings etc... What you
obviously don't get is the template based matching et al. that is part of
XSLT. But it sounds as if you're more concerned with giving developers who
are coming from a VB/JScript/Javascript background the ability to quickly
jump into the code base and with minimal effort be able to support it.
While I disagree with the foundation for the reasoning (again, I just don't
see the transition to a declarative/functional way of thinking as big of a
deal as some make it out to be) I do understand that the issue is considered
by many to be a big deal and as such would definitely recommend XQuery as a
decent alternative to XSLT for those that do.
I should also reemphasize EXSLT (EXSLT.org) and the fact that Saxon natively
supports a lot of these functions. I am currently (along with the project
lead Pieter Siegers, pietsieg.com) in the early stages of porting Saxon
7.9.1 over to .NET and can assure you that the processor is very capable of
performing in a production environment. And with Chris Bayes (bayes.co.uk)
excellent regex implementation in Javascript your well on your way to having
a complete solution that, with minimal effort, should work quite well. You
can download his regex libraries from the EXSLT.org site.
Hope I've given you some information you can find helpful!
Best regards,
<M:D/>
Barry
M. David Peterson wrote:
Hi Barry,
Thanks for the clarification. Your problem is pretty straight forward
and
in fact can be done fairly easily in XSLT 1.0. But you are correct in
your
assumption that 2.0 would be a much more complete and straight forward
solution. If for no other reason (and there are plenty) the regex
implementation in 2.0 gives you the much needed ability to do complex
string
matching that, while possible in 1.0, is more complex to implement than
is
worth the effort.
...
<M:D/>
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