RE: [xsl] When *not* to use XLST...

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I can't see anything in this list that's at all difficult to do in XSLT.

>but the syntax to do takes a long time to discover by Google searches.

Perhaps you need a better strategy for learning the language. Buy yourself a
good book, and read it.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/


> -----Original Message-----
> From: shawn.milo@xxxxxxxxx [mailto:shawn.milo@xxxxxxxxx] On 
> Behalf Of Shawn Milochik
> Sent: 23 April 2009 19:51
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [xsl] When *not* to use XLST...
> 
> I'm writing an online application (as in a form you fill 
> out). When printed, it's about 30 pages long, so the site has 
> to be modular. I'm putting sections of it into XML files and 
> having XSLT process the controls (text boxes, etc.) into HTML forms.
> 
> XSLT is fantastic for allowing me to define XML and then 
> create dynamic text boxes, check boxes, and radio buttons. 
> However, it gets more complicated as need to add some 
> advanced features. I'm wondering if I should just create a 
> (programming) class to handle my XML pages and have my 
> back-end code read the XML directly and create the dynamic 
> HTML instead.
> 
> Below are a few things I need to do. My question is whether 
> these things are easy or straightforward enough in XSLT, or 
> whether I should just be writing server-side code to do all 
> this. As I said earlier, I'm brand-new to XML (as of about 
> two weeks ago), and have just pieced a bunch of things 
> together from Google searches to get it working so far. I 
> wouldn't really say I "know" XSLT -- only that I have "been 
> using" XSLT.
> 
> 1. For some controls, I want to automatically create 
> additional controls. An example would be a table which, when 
> generated, would also need a set of text boxes (one per 
> column in the table), which would be used to edit data within 
> a table row, or add a new row.
> 
> 2. If I have many simple controls in a row, for example 15 
> checkboxes, I'd like to have them two or three per line, 
> rather than one per line.
> Of course, it has to gracefully handle a number of items 
> which doesn't divide evenly by the desired number per line.
> 
> 3. Some XML nodes of the same type may have some, but not 
> all, possible attributes. The HTML for one case can be 
> different than another.
> 
> It seems that XSLT is designed to turn XML data into a 
> formatted document, rather than use XML data to create 
> dynamic forms, and maybe I should just be writing code. I 
> just wanted to check in with the list to see whether the 
> problem is more due to my lack of knowledge about XSLT than 
> limitations of XSLT. If that's the case, let me know, and 
> please recommend the best book for becoming a proficient user of XSLT.
> 
> A final note which may help clarify what I'm asking for: The 
> two most challenging problems I've had so far were how to get 
> the value of an attribute of a parent node in the XSLT 
> section that processes the child, and how to check to see 
> whether any of the child nodes had a specific value in a 
> named attribute when processing the parent node.
> Both are trivial to do with a class in a programming language 
> by just accessing a property or method. To be fair they're 
> trivial in XSLT as well, but the syntax to do takes a long 
> time to discover by Google searches.
> 
> Thanks,
> Shawn