Hi,
recently I've evaluated some XSLT WYSIWYG-editors, with focus on the
code they create. While comparing the tools, I identified three common
use cases, how XSLT can be used (of course there are more use cases
possible):
1) document to document transformations
2) data to data transformations
3) data to document transformations
A good example for 1) might be DocBook: there is a well structured XML
and a (very complex) XSLT which creates the result XML (e.g. FO).
Use case 2) is more about conversion between two different data formats:
for example, there exist a whole bunch of schemas representing a person.
So XSLT can map between two of these formats. There are some
implementations out there, like Altova MapForce.
But use case 3) has a problem: in my opinion XSLT is not really intended
to transform data-centric XML into a document-centric XML. Of course it
can be done, but the programming style is more imperative (for-each)
than template based (apply-template). There are a lot of tools, which
try to solve this data-document-transformation e.g. Altova StlyeVision
or StylusStudio XSLT Designer. But I think they don't succeed because
the generated code is mainly inside only one very big template with
imperative statements.
Coming to an end, I have two questions:
- Does anybody agree/disagree to my classification?
- How can I handle use case 3)? To my mind it would be best to convert a
data-centric XML into a well structured documen-centric XML and then
apply a XSLT stylesheet.
Best regards,
Peter Gerstbach
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