Re: Can you help with this?

[Niclas Hedhman <niclas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Either I don't understand you, or you don't understand XML/XSL.

XSL is the "template" that takes the well-formed XML data and can process it to
become HTML.
If you have SQL queries returning different column names (for instance), they
should still be described as a limited number of DTDs (possibly 1) and
the XSL stylesheet can be designed to handle it/them.
AFAIK, there are no automatic XSL generators, and I don't believe we will see
an HTML->XSL code generator ever, due to HTMLs weak standard and coherence to
rules. Coding is unfortunately necessary.

I would recommend you to take a look at Cocoon (xml.apache.org), which is a
serverside XML/XSL publishing engine. Included there is a SQLProducer, which
allows for dynamic content to be produced, and the result set can be processed
by a XSL Stylesheet into HTML.

But, maybe I misunderstood you completely...

Niclas

Darren Shilson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Please forgive my lack of knowledge about the subject, but I would like to
> know if this is possible.
>
> I want to get some data out of a database using XML and have it presented to
> me as HTML.
>
> Is it possible for a tool to generate XSL templates on the fly without a
> programmer creating them first?. I'm thinking that there is an overall tool
> which contains sub tools.
>
> For example: -
>
> The criteria from a user comes into the tool. An XSL generator takes the
> criteria and generates an XSL template.
>
> Now whilst this is happening, the tool passes the criteria to a database.The
> database sends back the correct data which matches the criteria.
>
> The tool takes this data and passes it into an XML generator which produces
> a well formed document.
>
> The resultant XSL template and XML document are passed into an XSL Parser
> from which an HTML document is produced and sent back to the user.
>
> Now is this possible??. Is there a way of dynamically generating XSL
> templates so to save the programmers time from having to write them from
> scratch and holding them in some sort of library.


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