xsl-list
[Top] [All Lists]

RE: "Debugging" XSLT? Experiences and Methods...

2005-07-20 10:31:53
A lot of the work in XSLT 2.0 that tries to make the language more strongly
typed is addressing this issue. Defining a schema for your source document
and result document, importing these schemas into the stylesheet, and using
the new facilities to declare data types for the variables, templates, and
functions in your code, will go a long way towards early detection of
errors. It can't eliminate the need to generate test cases that provide
thorough code coverage, but in practice, you'll get more errors out with
fewer test cases. Some of these will be detected at compile time, some at
run-time.

Give this a try with Saxon-SA and let us know your experiences.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Koch [mailto:TheRanger(_at_)gmx(_dot_)net] 
Sent: 20 July 2005 17:35
To: Mulberry list
Subject: [xsl] "Debugging" XSLT? Experiences and Methods...

Hello all,

by now I have done some XSLT scripting mostly with our help and with
background from many many trials and good O'Reilly books :-). 
I have also
background in a range of programming languages. Coming from 
thie background
I find it quite difficult, but not impossible, to generate 
stylesheets.
However, ensuring that they do the rignt thing (on the 
semanic level) is
quite a headache. Therefore I have at least one or two tests for each
stylesheet (e.g. I have a stylesheet that removes structures 
which contain
title nodes; than I have another stylesheet that extracts 
only those who
contain titles and I compare their numbers (number of 
extraced structures)
regarding the original set. If they add up they do very 
probable the right
thing - OR THEY ARE BOTH WRONG TO THE SAME DEGREE). I guess you get my
problem here. It is really difficult and depends on the 
problem. It can also
go very easily completely wrong. If there are small errors it 
might result
in mistakes in the data which are almost impossible to find 
(e.g. in very
large data sets of 10000s of XML structures). 

My question here is: How do you verify your stylesheets? 

Is there software or methodlogy which deals with this 
problem? I think, the
incredibly flexiblity and power of XSLT is at the same time 
its problem. It
is very difficult to do the right thing. Just thinking and 
being careful and
checking the code 10 times does not help always... 

Perhaps somebody has references of methodologies or 
books/papers written
about this problem. Does somebody know good websites that contain some
information about good practise and guidelines of doing good 
stylesheets? A
discussion is more than welcome and I think it would be right 
place to have
one....

Looking forward to interesting experiences, comments and suggestions.

Best Regards,
Karl

-- 
GMX DSL = Maximale Leistung zum minimalen Preis!
2000 MB nur 2,99, Flatrate ab 4,99 Euro/Monat: 
http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl

--~------------------------------------------------------------------
XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/
or e-mail: 
<mailto:xsl-list-unsubscribe(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
--~--





--~------------------------------------------------------------------
XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
To unsubscribe, go to: http://lists.mulberrytech.com/xsl-list/
or e-mail: <mailto:xsl-list-unsubscribe(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com>
--~--



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>