[xsl] XSL Document Creation tools

Subject: [xsl] XSL Document Creation tools
From: John Aschenbrenner <jaschenbrenner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 11:44:28 -0700
During the course of my employ I often find myself creating HTML based
reports using XML and XSL.  I often wish that there were a good XSL Document
Creation tool that I could use to do this.  Perhaps if I lay out the steps
of my report creation all will become clear.

First I create an html document as a mock up for my report.  During this
phase I am able to us WYSIWYG html creation tools that simplify this
process.

The second phase of the report generation endeavor I create the XSL
document.  It is during this phase that I separate the static (display -
style) HTML tags from the actual dynamic data that will be displayed in the
HTML report.  I do this by leaving the static HTML tags as literals in the
XSL and creating small callable templates with params for the dynamic
information.  This part of the process is very mundane and consists of a lot
of cutting and pasting of document text in order to create the necessary XSL
document.  It is this part of the report creation that I wish I could
somehow automate.

The third and final leg of this journey is to create that actual XML that
will be transformed.  This is relatively simple in that I just create the
proper SQL statement(s) to retrieve the data into an XML document.

If there were a tool that I could use to help generate the XSL it would
greatly reduce my time in producing a report.  I envision the way that a
tool of this sort would be used is as follows -
Starting with a given html document being viewed as rendered by a browser
you would go through the document and highlight the dynamic data.  At this
point some sort of compilation or other rendering would take place and voila
an XSL document would be produced.

Does anyone know if such a tool exists?



Thanks In Advance,
John Aschenbrenner
Ignition Mortgage Technology Solutions, Inc.
jaschenbrenner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ph: (253)858-8955 x 239
http://www.ignitionmts.com




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