XML / XSL

Christian Graus27-Oct-02 15:20

Christian Graus

27-Oct-02 15:20

you need to use xsl:attribute to create the href= part of the anchor tag. Something like:

<a>
<xsl:attribute name="href">
<xsl:value-of select="href"/>
</xsl:attribute>
</a>

That's off the top of my head, but it's basically correct.

Christian

<i>No offense, but I don't really want to encourage the creation of another VB developer.</i> - <b>Larry Antram 22 Oct 2002</b>

<i>Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that...</i> - <b>Shog9 04-09-2002</b>

<i>During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. </i> - <B>Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002</B>

Philip Fitzsimons27-Oct-02 23:24

27-Oct-02 23:24

or the short version:

<a href="{link}"><xsl:value-of select='link'/></a>

notice the use of the curly brakets to shortcut any xpath expression....

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, a sore thumb you will have."

Christian Graus27-Oct-02 23:47

Christian Graus

27-Oct-02 23:47

That looks great - how does it work ? It's pulling a node called 'link' out of the current context node, and the curly brackets mean that it's put into there, or the curly brackets pull it out of the current context node seperately ?

Christian

No offense, but I don't really want to encourage the creation of another VB developer. - Larry Antram 22 Oct 2002

Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002

During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002

Philip Fitzsimons28-Oct-02 0:06

28-Oct-02 0:06

curly brackets are shorthand - they tell the xsl processor to replace the contents with the result of the xpath xpresions

xml:
<company logo="bob.gif"/>

xlst:

<xsl:apply-template match="company"><br />
 <img src="{@logo}"/><br />
</xsl:apply-template>

hope this makes sense - saves alot of typing Smile | :)

[edit]note that is always in the context of the current node - so equal to current()/@logo
[/edit]

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, a sore thumb you will have."

Christian Graus28-Oct-02 0:21

Christian Graus

28-Oct-02 0:21

Cool - yes, thanks. I did not know you could do that, and I will find it very useful.

Christian

No offense, but I don't really want to encourage the creation of another VB developer. - Larry Antram 22 Oct 2002

Hey, at least Logo had, at it's inception, a mechanical turtle. VB has always lacked even that... - Shog9 04-09-2002

During last 10 years, with invention of VB and similar programming environments, every ill-educated moron became able to develop software. - Alex E. - 12-Sept-2002

Paul Watson28-Oct-02 2:03

Paul Watson

28-Oct-02 2:03

Philip Fitzsimons wrote:
curly brackets are shorthand - they tell the xsl processor to replace the contents with the result of the xpath xpresions

Wow, thanks for the awesome tip. Never seen this mentioned in any XSL tutorial before, is it part of the standard?

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Ray Cassick wrote:
Well I am not female, not gay and I am not Paul Watson

Philip Fitzsimons28-Oct-02 2:54

XML Schema:constraint attribute integer

28-Oct-02 2:54

yes its part of the standard - comes under 7.6.2 Attribute Value Templates

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116#dt-attribute-value-template[^]

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, a sore thumb you will have."

hui_km25-Oct-02 0:27

hui_km

25-Oct-02 0:27

how do i restrict the values of an attribute to be any integer value EXCEPT 0?
for example:

<xsd:attribute name="id" use="required">
<xsd:simpleType>
<xsd:restriction base="xsd:integer" >
<xsd:minExclusion value="0"/> 
<xsd:maxExclusion value="0"/> 
</xsd:restriction>
</xsd:simpleType>
</xsd:attribute>

this code does not work... how can i allow all values for integer EXCEPT zero?

thanks..
meng

Re: XML Schema:constraint attribute integer

Hans Ruck25-Oct-02 2:15

Hans Ruck

25-Oct-02 2:15

Your restriction will result in a void type, intersecting (0, +inf) with (-inf, 0).
Try using the following pattern: (\+|\-)?[1-9]+[0-9]*

rechi

Re: XML Schema:constraint attribute integer

huikm25-Oct-02 2:50

huikm

25-Oct-02 2:50

thanks alot! the pattern works...

meng

how to open a document in xml/xsl???

Asim N.24-Oct-02 2:33

Asim N.

24-Oct-02 2:33

hello
can someone guide me in opening a document i.e .doc or .pdf or .html or .txt in xml/xsl.
can someone help me out

Asim

Re: how to open a document in xml/xsl???

Philip Fitzsimons25-Oct-02 2:09

Which my choice? DOM or SAX

25-Oct-02 2:09

this makes no sense, please give us more detail of what you are trying to do

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, a sore thumb you will have."

Clark John23-Oct-02 20:13

23-Oct-02 20:13

I have a big XML file and I want to use some XSLT file to transform it, which is the best choice?
I used the DOM process the file, but I found It need a very huge memory. So I used the SAX, but it cann't transform the file with XSLT file.

Paul Watson23-Oct-02 21:46

Paul Watson

23-Oct-02 21:46

Clark John wrote:
So I used the SAX, but it cann't transform the file with XSLT file.

Brief discussion on the topic[^]

Not having used SAX I am no authority but from what I know you use SAX when you want to do simple enough tasks on large XML documents. I think the main thing about SAX is that it is a stream or forward only type method, not like the DOM. Which is why XSL via SAX could be a b with an itch (e.g. XSL templates jump back and forth in an XML doc.)

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Ray Cassick wrote:
Well I am not female, not gay and I am not Paul Watson

Clark John23-Oct-02 22:44

23-Oct-02 22:44

Thanks. But the DOM process a 3.89M XML file need about 100M memory, how can I reduce the memory dosage on DOM.

Paul Watson24-Oct-02 1:52

Paul Watson

24-Oct-02 1:52

Clark John wrote:
But the DOM process a 3.89M XML file need about 100M memory, how can I reduce the memory dosage on DOM.

Hmmm, I have not had any experience with working with such large XML files (I would consider 3.89M big for an XML file, must have a ton of entries.) Normally I use XML as an intermediary format (database -> xml -> XHTML/whatever) so the files never get big.

Just a thought and I may be totally off the mark but you might just open the XML file as a normal text file and then extract the block of nodes you want out of it and save those as a subset file of the original XML file. Then run that through DOM.

Also XSL on a 3.89M file could potentially be a killer.

This CP article may have some ideas for you and this seems like a starting point for some info.

Good luck Smile | :)

Paul Watson
Bluegrass
Cape Town, South Africa

Ray Cassick wrote:
Well I am not female, not gay and I am not Paul Watson

Clark John24-Oct-02 20:44

24-Oct-02 20:44

Think you! Smile | :)

Chris Austin25-Oct-02 5:38

Chris Austin

25-Oct-02 5:38

Paul Watson wrote:
Hmmm, I have not had any experience with working with such large XML files (I would consider 3.89M big for an XML file, must have a ton of entries.)

Actualy you'd be suprised at how big some XML files can get.

Paul Watson wrote:
Just a thought and I may be totally off the mark but you might just open the XML file as a normal text file and then extract the block of nodes you want out of it and save those as a subset file of the original XML file. Then run that through DOM.

That's righ on.

At my last place we handeled transactions/data wharehousing for utility companys. Every company sent data in some bizzare flat-file format, EDI, or XML. Depending on the frequency of the transactions, we could see 10mb+ XML files.

We were just doing XML -> DB or DB ->XML -> format 'X'

Working on the XML files we would open up a stream, and use SAX to quickly parse the XML. At this point one could just use their XSL to verify content (we used a custom rules engine to apply business logic.)

Performance wasn't bad with this approach but, I have qualify this by saying that our implementation was done in <gasp> JAVA. With an optimized JVM.

Michael A. Barnhart24-Oct-02 5:57

Michael A. Barnhart

24-Oct-02 5:57

What SAX implementation are you using?
You can definitely transform an xml data set with either (assuming your implementation supports transformations.) However what you have to understand is that the order of processing is not necessarily the same so the XPath expression in the XSLT definition may be different to handle the file depending on a DOM implementation vs a SAX implementation.

For large files SAX definitly takes less memory.

"We are what we repeatedly do. excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

Clark John24-Oct-02 20:46

24-Oct-02 20:46

Can you get me some advise of SAX implementation? Thank you.

Michael A. Barnhart25-Oct-02 1:25

Michael A. Barnhart

25-Oct-02 1:25

I definitly will be willing to offer some comments.
Some of my background to let you understand the limits of what I can offer.
For the last 18 months I have not been programming (much), as I am now a system architect (Manager egad.) For our needs we have been building upon the Apache Cocoon project. It however is Java based (again so others have been doing the programming that I have spec'd, I am still a C++ guy.) Due to the above most of our parser usage has been with the Java versions of Apache Xerces and Xalan. A warning here. There are C++ versions but I have found the Xalan is quirky and have stayed away from it.

I am assuming you are using the MSXML parser. I have not used the SAX implementation of it. However:
For some reference just type in MSXML and SAX into google.
I just did and the first page was
http://www.perfectxml.com/msxmlsax.asp
It looks like it has a intro and several references. Might be a starting point.

I then added Transformation to google and found
http://www.perfectxml.com/msxmlxslt.asp
google must like perfetxml today Smile | :)

The big issue is here what is happening between the parsers. In DOM you have the whole thing and can process the data in how ever you see fit. In SAX you are responding to events that are thrown as the data stream is read. You may have to think a little here but the impact is the sequence of how you have to respond to those events may be different.

I suggest get a tool that will step through or at least display the results of a transformation. Start with a simple example to get a feel of what is happening.
Some I can recommend are
Marrowsofts ($ but a 30 day eval)
StylusStudio (Same)

There are some other free tools also.
see http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/xmltools/name_ix.html
I have used "CookTop" http://www.xmlcooktop.com/ in the above list and for a free tool it works fairly well.
I hope this helps some.

"We are what we repeatedly do. excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

Clark John25-Oct-02 20:20