Wendell Piez wrote:
At 12:05 PM 10/20/2004, Rob wrote:
Wendell Piez wrote:
Whatever I do, I want to keep processing completely controlled by
the configuration file.
Maybe someone on this list who knows Ant better than I do (it's on my
list!) can comment on how Ant (a Java build framework) could query a
configuration file to determine which stylesheet to call when a job
is invoked. A poor man's version of the same (though of course Ant is
free) could use a batch file to run a transform on your config file,
to create another batch file (in which the delegation could be
managed), and then execute it. In other words, these things can be done.
I haven't followed this thread too closely but in ant you can use
'input' to allow the user to enter data at the command line. For example:
<input
message="Enter an XSL file name:"
addproperty="xsl.name"/>
<xslt
in="source.xml"
out="result.html"
style="${xsl.name}"/>
Ah, that's nice.
I presume it also wouldn't be hard to get a value for xsl.name by
querying into an XML config document?
Sure. You can use the XmlProperty task to load properties from a well
formed props-like file:
<root>
<properties>
<foo>bar.xsl</foo>
</properties>
</root>
which is roughly equivalent to this Java property file:
root.properties.foo = bar.xsl
or
<xslt
in="source.xml"
out="result.html"
style="${root.properties.foo}"/>
Of course, you could also load the config into the transformation to
find the XSL template name to call.
Or you could transform the config file to an ant build file. You can
also use/create an XMLCatalog for custom resolution. You can also use a
validate task to ensure your content is valid according to some schema.
Ant is wonderful :)
or simply doing some kind of
conditional testing to provide for a mapping of labels to stylesheets,
This gets tricky in ant, but can be done using javascript or some
scripting language that can be brought into ant (but it is kind of like
using extensions in XSL).
or simply
<input
message="Which format would you like?"
addproperty="format"/>
<xslt
in="source.xml"
out="result.html"
style="${format}.xsl"/>
sure -- much more user friendly :)
best,
-Rob
Cheers,
Wendell
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Wendell Piez
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