I can't see anything in this list that's at all difficult to do in XSLT.
but the syntax to do takes a long time to discover by Google searches.
Perhaps you need a better strategy for learning the language. Buy yourself a
good book, and read it.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
-----Original Message-----
From: shawn(_dot_)milo(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com
[mailto:shawn(_dot_)milo(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com] On
Behalf Of Shawn Milochik
Sent: 23 April 2009 19:51
To: xsl-list(_at_)lists(_dot_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com
Subject: [xsl] When *not* to use XLST...
I'm writing an online application (as in a form you fill
out). When printed, it's about 30 pages long, so the site has
to be modular. I'm putting sections of it into XML files and
having XSLT process the controls (text boxes, etc.) into HTML forms.
XSLT is fantastic for allowing me to define XML and then
create dynamic text boxes, check boxes, and radio buttons.
However, it gets more complicated as need to add some
advanced features. I'm wondering if I should just create a
(programming) class to handle my XML pages and have my
back-end code read the XML directly and create the dynamic
HTML instead.
Below are a few things I need to do. My question is whether
these things are easy or straightforward enough in XSLT, or
whether I should just be writing server-side code to do all
this. As I said earlier, I'm brand-new to XML (as of about
two weeks ago), and have just pieced a bunch of things
together from Google searches to get it working so far. I
wouldn't really say I "know" XSLT -- only that I have "been
using" XSLT.
1. For some controls, I want to automatically create
additional controls. An example would be a table which, when
generated, would also need a set of text boxes (one per
column in the table), which would be used to edit data within
a table row, or add a new row.
2. If I have many simple controls in a row, for example 15
checkboxes, I'd like to have them two or three per line,
rather than one per line.
Of course, it has to gracefully handle a number of items
which doesn't divide evenly by the desired number per line.
3. Some XML nodes of the same type may have some, but not
all, possible attributes. The HTML for one case can be
different than another.
It seems that XSLT is designed to turn XML data into a
formatted document, rather than use XML data to create
dynamic forms, and maybe I should just be writing code. I
just wanted to check in with the list to see whether the
problem is more due to my lack of knowledge about XSLT than
limitations of XSLT. If that's the case, let me know, and
please recommend the best book for becoming a proficient user of XSLT.
A final note which may help clarify what I'm asking for: The
two most challenging problems I've had so far were how to get
the value of an attribute of a parent node in the XSLT
section that processes the child, and how to check to see
whether any of the child nodes had a specific value in a
named attribute when processing the parent node.
Both are trivial to do with a class in a programming language
by just accessing a property or method. To be fair they're
trivial in XSLT as well, but the syntax to do takes a long
time to discover by Google searches.
Thanks,
Shawn
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