8.4 XSL Processing

I spent a night the other week trying to figure out how to get the XSL libraries to do anything. I no longer need it now, but I did discover some things others with an immediate need may want to be aware of.

• Transforming an XML document requires you parse the XSL and XML documents separately first. After that, you tell the XSL.RuleDatabase to process the XML document. The result is another XML document with the transformations.

  A code snippet for doing just that appears below.

  | rules xmlDoc htmlDoc |
  
  rules := XSL.RuleDatabase new readFileNamed: 'paymentspending.xsl'.
  xmlDoc := XML.SAXParser defaultParserClass
               processDocumentInFilename: 'paymentspending.xml'
               beforeScanDo: [ :p | p validate: false ].
  htmlDoc := rules process: xmlDoc.
  

  There is also a readString: method which can be used instead of readFileNamed:.

• The XSL library doesn’t use the W3-approved stylesheet, but instead uses the draft version (same one Microsoft uses). <xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl">
• The functions position() and count() aren’t implemented, or if they are, aren’t implemented in the way other XSL tools implement it.