catching an URL variable in xslt

Flashlight · August 20th, 2003, 12:56 PM

Hello all,

I need some help catching an url-variable that I am passing from an html page to an xsl page. I'm getting bruised elsewhere, perhaps this is where the true guru's reside.......

- what I'm trying to do, is:
in one xslt page, I have it outputing HTML, with some links to another xslt page, that will also output html, both using the same xml input page.

The links are as so (example):
<a href="apTransDetail.cfm?item={../ColData[@colID='10']/@value}">845.92</a>
which comes out in the HTML as:
<a href="apTransDetail.cfm?item=2852-1059087424">845.92</a>

In other words, I am passing the ID number of a transaction, so I can click on the amount/href, and then go to a page displaying the detail of the transaction. - The cfm page in the href is the template that calls the xsl processor (msxml).

The transaction ID that I'm trying to pass is the key I need to filter my output on the 2nd page, to just show the detail for that item.

I suppose I could make a 2nd xml request/response for the detail from the DB, but wouldn't it be cleaner and faster to simply re-use my xml page for both pages, as it has the detail for both?

Orrrrr - is there another approach I am not considering in my XML/XSL newbie state?

thanx,
Flashlight

armmarti · August 21st, 2003, 01:32 AM

I think your approach is quite ok: I would choose the same approach. About reusing the XML doc: if the interface is designed so that the XML source document you supplied for transformation is referred only by filename, then it's impossible to reuse it. That is, if you perform the transformation by calling some function like this:

Code:

  outputDoc = transform(xmlFileName, xsltFileName)

and this is the only way to perform transformations in your cfml pages,
then you can't reuse XML documents for that purpose. Or, if you can use objects to perform transformations, like this, for example:

Code:

  sourceXMLObj = load(xmlFileName);
  xsltObj = load(xslFileName);
  outputDoc = transform(sourceXMLObj, xsltObj)

then probably you can get the XML source object once and put it in a session variable for later use. But in this case you must be sure that the XML source document is not very big to hurt the server memory(may be the server will keep the XML as a DOM tree, which is really expensive) since the server will keep one such object for every user-session.

If you are thinking also about how to pass the parameter to the stylesheet (through apTransDetail.cfm), then you must look at MSXML's documentation. Generally, every XSLT processor does it in a different form.

Regards,
Armen