Re: [xsl] "Debugging" XSLT? Experiences and Methods...

[Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Karl,
  If you don't have Mike's book XSLT Programmer's Reference, you are
missing something :) It discusses best practices, design patterns and
many great things about XSLT. Hope you have this book, or will buy it
:)

Regards,
Mukul

On 7/20/05, Karl Koch <TheRanger@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> by now I have done some XSLT scripting mostly with our help and with
> background from many many trials and good O'Reilly books :-). I have also
> background in a range of programming languages. Coming from thie background
> I find it quite difficult, but not impossible, to generate stylesheets.
> However, ensuring that they do the rignt thing (on the semanic level) is
> quite a headache. Therefore I have at least one or two tests for each
> stylesheet (e.g. I have a stylesheet that removes structures which contain
> title nodes; than I have another stylesheet that extracts only those who
> contain titles and I compare their numbers (number of extraced structures)
> regarding the original set. If they add up they do very probable the right
> thing - OR THEY ARE BOTH WRONG TO THE SAME DEGREE). I guess you get my
> problem here. It is really difficult and depends on the problem. It can
also
> go very easily completely wrong. If there are small errors it might result
> in mistakes in the data which are almost impossible to find (e.g. in very
> large data sets of 10000s of XML structures).
>
> My question here is: How do you verify your stylesheets?
>
> Is there software or methodlogy which deals with this problem? I think, the
> incredibly flexiblity and power of XSLT is at the same time its problem. It
> is very difficult to do the right thing. Just thinking and being careful
and
> checking the code 10 times does not help always...
>
> Perhaps somebody has references of methodologies or books/papers written
> about this problem. Does somebody know good websites that contain some
> information about good practise and guidelines of doing good stylesheets? A
> discussion is more than welcome and I think it would be right place to have
> one....
>
> Looking forward to interesting experiences, comments and suggestions.
>
> Best Regards,
> Karl
>
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