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RE: [xsl] Implementing a (fairly) complex business rule

2008-09-30 12:05:11
It's good to see that education is serving a purpose, anyway. 
Remediating buggy machine-generated code on a deadline: that has to 
fall into the category of dirty jobs someone has to do. Fun.

Quite so.  It's a heck of a lot better than trying to use BizTalk's
drag-and-drop "mapper", though.  I even blogged about that:

http://peredur.blog.co.uk/2008/09/11/a-matter-of-style-4714835

FWIW, as I suggested, seeing constructs like 
"normalize-space(element)" vs "string-length(element/text()) > 0" 
is part of what tips off an expert as to whether code has been 
written by a skilled practitioner of XSLT/XPath, or by a Perl or 
Javascript or C programmer who has just jumped in. 

Got it in one!  Well, two out of three, actually.  My Javascript isn't
so hot.

Or maybe by a 
program written by one of these estimable people. 

Not guilty

The best defense 
I've heard of expressions like the latter is that it's more explicit 
-- which may be true, if your audience is like you. The most honest 
is that it's done out of habit.

Agreed.  Languages should be used in the way they were intended to be
used.  I always feel that languages have a grain, like wood.  Going with
the grain is so much easier ...

And I happen to think that well-written XSLT can be really elegant.  So
I'm aspiring :)

The XPath way is obscure if you don't know XPath. But I've never felt 
it was wrong to give those who don't know XPath, but who are trying 
to program XSLT, a little XPath exercise. :-)

Agreed again.  And I'll get there.  It may just take a little practice
... and a few more posts here.

:-D


Peter


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