Hi,
I am trying to help in the design of an overall XML/XSL strategy for my
comapny's CMS system which is going through its third re-write. I have
spoken with a friend who is very good at XSL and would like to expand on
the comments he made regarding our strategy.
Firstly our CMS is heavily data oriented (no news or blogs or similar)
designed for archaeological projects trying to keep track of thier
sites, digs, gis and finds information etc etc. On any given
installation there may be up to 20 or 30 main data tables with several
related tables containing more and/or repeating detail. Each of these
main data tables has a set of forms with navigation and all the bells
and whistles (edit, browse and mixed edit and browse forms). There are
also lists of said data elements which link directly to the detail
forms. All pretty standard stuff. There is a web based configuration
tool that allows us and site administrators to add/remove and change
what appears in these lists and detail forms. This means we are not
writing new pages everytime we deploy our software to another group or
when an existing group wants to add another main data table to their
database - we just add or alter the configuration. Pages/forms and
navigation are all generated on the fly using the configuration details
so this would seem to be an ideal candidate for XML/XSLT.
Currently we are leaning towards getting the configuration tool to
publish XSLT templates (as and when the configuration is changed) for
each mode (edit, browse etc) and each target (browser, wap etc) for each
main data object/aspect. I am told by my friend this is already going
down a slippery slope as the XSL should not change and have all the
capability in it already. We are planning on keeping the XML as pure
data - so not even have attributes for table fields like 'maxlength' etc
as that would all be handled using the configuration tool and hence
published in the XSL template for that particular data object. Certain
common elements like menus, headers and footers would all be included
but I am not so sure about the main approach now.
If any of this is at all clear and you have any comments, please please
do as I would really appreciate them.
Thanks,
Chad.
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