Re: [xsl] XSLT use cases; data-centric to document-centric transformations

[David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>]

> - Does anybody agree/disagree to my classification?

Oh, I expect so:-)

It isn't always clear whether a particular XML file is data or document
centric for a start. In particular many basically "document" oriented
formats that support mixed data have "data centric" subsections (eg
lists of bibligraphies or metadata sections) I think XSLt was
intentionally designed to handle both these cases.

>  but the programming style is more imperative (for-each) 
> than template based (apply-template). 

I know what you mean here but the distinction between imperative and
declarative programming styles doesn't really coincide with using or not
using apply-templates. xsl:for-each is (always) equivalent to  using
apply-templates with a unique mode, and a single template in that mode,
so for-each is just a syntactic shorthand for one restricted usage of
apply-templates, not a completely different paradigm that one can make
hard and fast rules about.

> - How can I handle use case 3)? To my mind it would be best to convert a 
> data-centric XML into a well structured documen-centric XML and then 
> apply a XSLT stylesheet.

I don't understand this question. Or at least, I don't understand the
proposed answer. How would you do the conversion that you mention?
If you use XSLT then you would presumably need a stylesheet of your type
3, so this solution appears to be circular?

That said XSLT2 does make certain data-document translations easier,
specifically the grouping constructs and the more extended range of
functions such as min() and max().

David

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