Re: [xsl] Managing XSLTS for XSLFO - Shared templates and attribute sets

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2008-03-27 22:31 +1100, Kamal wrote:
> I have a number of XSLTs for our clients that produce XSL FO. Right 
> now, I make extensive use of attribute sets. I basically setup all 
> my attribute sets at the start of the file and call them as I need 
> them. This works great, just as long as you don't want to share 
> templates. Unfortunately, I am going to need to share some of those 
> templates in the future, but the attributes used may be different 
> (obviously, these attributes are defining styling).
>
> Any thoughts as to how I can have my cake and eat it too?

Have a stylesheet fragment defining common sets and common 
behaviours, then have different stylesheet fragments for each 
distinct environment import the common fragment.  Each environment 
will then have their own distinct amalgam of their specific styles 
and the common styles.

To see an example of this, there is a free stylesheet library in the 
developer resources section of our web site (linked below) for 
presenting instances of the Universal Business Language (UBL) to both 
HTML and PDF.  This library illustrates the importation of common 
fragments, including a common fragment between both HTML and XSL-FO 
stylesheets implementing the access to the UBL instances.  This 
common bit is at the bottom of each import hierarchy.  A number of 
the stylesheet fragments in this library are synthesized using 
another resource we make available that is a stylesheet that writes 
stylesheets ... so designed precisely to allow different environments 
to import common behaviours.

It happens that those import trees in my UBL example don't take 
advantage of <xsl:attribute-set>, but they do show what happens with 
the overriding of template rules and mode matches.

Note a difference between the importation of attribute sets and other 
named top-level constructs is that an importing attribute set doesn't 
supplant the imported attribute set, it augments the imported 
attribute set.  For other named top-level constructs the importing 
construct supplants the imported construct.  Because of this 
distinction, it is not possible through importation to prevent an 
attribute from an imported attribute set to be processed, thus, to 
"undo" a property such as font-weight="bold" it would be necessary to 
say font-weight="normal".

I hope this helps.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . Ken


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