At 2004-02-17 03:27 +0000, Donal Regan wrote:
Does anyone know of any tool out there that can
automatically generate the required XSLT if it is
given a sample input file and output file?
I think that's the same as asking "is there a tool that looks at my data
and my output and writes a C program to produce it?" ... if such a tool
existed there would be a lot of people out of work!
But, if you asked "is there a tool that will generate an XSLT stylesheet
from an annotated output file where the annotations reflect properties of
the input file?", there is a partially-developed free resource on our web
site called "LiterateXSLT" that does just that.
I experimented with the concept to write the UBL 0.70 XSLT stylesheets for
XSL-FO: I created the XSL-FO output first, then annotated it in a private
namespace with information about the source file, pressed the button and
out came an XSLT stylesheet that worked with any XML input file that
matched the annotations. I shipped those XSLT stylesheets unaltered
because they were sufficiently detailed and structured to be standalone
stylesheets.
I say "partially developed" because when I went to generalize what worked
for me for UBL to a truly general solution, I hit a brick wall on the
rationalization of concatenated XPath location path expressions due to the
limitation of the first step of a location path. I'm thinking that with
XSLT 2 LiterateXSLT probably could become a truly generalized solution for
annotating candidate results and synthesizing XSLT stylesheets.
I don't have the time or the problems to solve needed to progress the
experimentation into anything of production quality.
I've released the first version of LiterateXSLT as a free resource under
the modified BSD license, so you can download it and play with it if you want.
I hope this helps.
...................... Ken
--
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G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd. http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
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