1. XSL Unit 6 November 2

2. XSL –eXtensible Stylesheet Language –Basically a stylesheet for XML documents XSL has three parts: –XSLT –XPath –XSL-FO

3. XSLT The most important bit of XSL XSLT allows us to transform an XML document into another XML document –For instance, transform an XML document into an XHTML document XSLT relies on using XPath –We’re going to use it, but not cover it –Don’t have to go into detail in order to create simple, effective XSL documents

4. XSLT Basics The whole idea behind XSLT is template matching What’s a template? –Let’s say we have a list of students like what we’ve done in class: Marky Mark 2001-22222

5. Templates, cont. We know what one student “looks” like All students follow the same format: Student: first name last name student number Every single one of the students in our XML document are described in exactly the same manner We can use a template to identify and use the parts of each student

6. Marky Mark 200122222 Selma Blair 200133333 …… Templates, cont.

7. Creating a New XSL Stylesheet Created with a text editor Saved with file extension “.xsl” Just like with HTML, we have to put some “bits” at the top of our XSL file Again, you do not have to have these memorized completely –I will provide a blank version online when/if needed

8. Creating an XSL Stylesheet, cont. Or You can use either “xls:stylesheet” or “xls:transform”, they are identical

9. Linking the XSL file to the XML file The top of our XML file should read something like this: This is nearly identical to how we link HTML pages to CSS files Again, an empty file will be provided for you if needed –But! You do need to know how to link to an XSL file

10. xsl:template xsl:template is an XSL element We are going to use it to apply rules when the template match is found –match = “/” means that we’ll apply the template to the entire XML document This is the next line of our XSL file

11. XSL File, so far ……….

12. Beginning the Transformation to HTML What do we need for an html file? – –Maybe a tag? This is what we’ll add next to our XSL file

13. Beginning HTML XML Example ……….

14. In-Class Example Adding some HTML

15. How do we add data? gives us the value of a certain bit of our xml file Which bit? –We’ll use the select property and the information about our tag This long value for select is based on the structure of our XML document – is our root element – is contained within – is the data we’re interested in –Just like paths for URLs

16. In class Example Adding some data to our html Using more html tags

17. More than Student? We can get the data for a single student, but what about our list of 3 students? –Or 300 for that matter? –We don’t want to cut and paste for every student What if the number of students changes? We can use the element to loop through each of our students –Can use it to look through any “sets” of data nodes (think items with (+) marks)

18. Using requires the use of the select attribute But what to use? –Depends on the repeat of the data –In the case of having a list of students select = “studentList/student” Basically you can read this as “for each student, apply these rules below”

19. In Class Example Adding for-each to loop through the students in the XML document Reversing last and first name Changing the format of the data

20. Sorting the Data We can sort the data in our XML files –For instance, we can alphabetize our student list –Even if it’s not alphabetical in the XML file, the HTML output will have the items in alphabetical order We are going to use the element

21. Using We can specify what we are sorting on –First name? –Last name? – Default is to sort ascending (A, B…Z) –But we can reverse it by using the order property:

22. In Class Example Sorting the student list ascending and descending –Using both first and last name Another XML file with products

23. Questions?