am i doing this right?

davepass · April 7th, 2005, 01:42 PM

greetings,

very new to xml/xslt. I was wondering if I might get the opinnions of some more seasoned developers on my approach for this specific task.

The end result of what I am trying to do is an HTML page that displays data from 2 xml documents. The structure of the xml docs are identical but the data is different.

Currently, I have 1 xml doc that looks like this:

Code:

<comparison>
     <data>data1.xml</data>
     <data>data2.xml</data>
</comparison>

I use this to transform an XSLT that creates references to my 2 xml docs (data1.xml and data2.xml) like so:

Code:

<xsl:variable name="data1_file_name" select="/comparison/data[1]" />
<xsl:variable name="data1" select="document($data1_file_name)" />
<xsl:variable name="data2_file_name" select="/comparison/data[2]" />
<xsl:variable name="data2" select="document($data2_file_name)" />

Then for each set of data from $data1 and $data2 I am displaying, I create a named template and pass it a parameter telling it to either display data from the appropriate xml source.

This is cery watered down, but it should get the point across.

Code:

<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<table>

    <tr>
        <td>
            <xsl:call-template name="compare_guests">
                <xsl:with-param name="thisBase" select="$data1/party/guests" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </td>
    </tr>

    <tr>
        <td>
            <xsl:call-template name="compare_guests">
                <xsl:with-param name="thisBase" select="$data2/party/guests" />
            </xsl:call-template>
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

<xsl:template name="compare_guests">
    <xsl:param name="thisBase" />
    Total Invited: <xsl:value-of select="$thisBase/total" /><br />
    Confirmed: <xsl:value-of select="$thisBase/confirmed" /><br />
    Declined: <xsl:value-of select="$thisBase/declined" /><br />
</xsl:template>

The page contains several of these tables, each with their own template.

Is there a more standard or efficient way I should be going about this?

mhkay · April 7th, 2005, 01:48 PM

You can write a bit less code by using apply-templates. Instead of

<xsl:call-template name="compare_guests">
 <xsl:with-param name="thisBase" select="$data1/party/guests" />
 </xsl:call-template>

write

<xsl:apply-templates select="$data1/party/guests mode="compare-guests"/>

and instead of

<xsl:template name="compare_guests">
 <xsl:param name="thisBase" />
 Total Invited: <xsl:value-of select="$thisBase/total" /> 
 Confirmed: <xsl:value-of select="$thisBase/confirmed" /> 
 Declined: <xsl:value-of select="$thisBase/declined" /> 
</xsl:template>

write

<xsl:template match="guests" mode="compare_guests">
 Total Invited: <xsl:value-of select="total" /> 
 Confirmed: <xsl:value-of select="confirmed" /> 
 Declined: <xsl:value-of select="declined" /> 
</xsl:template>

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference

davepass · April 7th, 2005, 02:16 PM

Awesome! I thought it had something to do with mode attribute but couldn't quite grasp it.

Is there a "better" resource for learning this stuff than w3schools.com?