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XSLT Fundamentals Class

Altova Education partner This XSLT course is the last two days of the five-day XML training course, but it can be taken independently of the full package.

This XSLT class examines XSLT and XPath. XSLT is used to transform your XML documents into a format appropriate for particular applications (e.g., browsers) such as HTML or text. XPath allows you to specify a location in the referenced XML document to indicate which content or information you would like to use or extract. XPath provides a number of functions that may be applied to calculate, limit, or filter the query results.

XSL - The Language

XSL or Extensible Style Language is really a collection of several different languages including XSL Formatting Objects (XSLFO) and XSL Transformations (XSLT). Because of the complexity of XSLFO, we focus on XSLT and its sister technology, XPath. During your introduction to XSL, you will learn about:

  • the XSL family - its history, goals, state of development and common uses
  • the notion of transformation - specifically transforming XML into HTML
  • modeling the XML document: nodes, paths and trees (ancestors, siblings, descendents)
  • types of XSL processors

XSLT Templates

The transformation process relies upon templates that you define in your XSL. The XSL processor then matches portions of the XML that you dictate and replaces these portions with the code you described in your template, resulting in a brand new file. We examine the XSL templates and how the transformation process proceeds. In this course you will learn how to:

  • establish XSLT templates
  • designate matches with basic XPath
  • extract data from XML elements to be placed in the templates
  • extract data from XML element attributes
  • use a simple XSL processor
  • define the output type for your new document
  • transform XML to text
  • transform XML to HTML
  • apply particular (or all) templates

XSLT Elements

XSLT's power becomes more evident when we introduce several useful XSL elements. The folks at the W3 clearly sought a robust language when crafting XSL and provided tools for conditionals, loops, sorting, selection by regular expression (i.e., patterns) and more. In this course you will learn about:

  • testing and filtering results using XPath and XSLT conditionals
  • XSLT conditionals including XSL:IF and XSL:CHOOSE
  • XSLT simple "for-each" loops
  • how to sort the output of a for-each loop
  • how to create a secondary sort (subsort)of the data
  • how to add text to the resulting document

XPath in Use

XPath's power truly emerges when specifying complex node paths and utilizing XPath functions. In this part of the course you will learn how to:

  • specify a context, parent, child and attribute node
  • apply some valuable XPath functions
  • count the number of items in a node-set
  • perform basic math functions on numerical data
  • generate IDs for each node in a node-set
  • determine an element node's name and whether it has content using XPath
  • determine when and where an XPath function may be called

XSLT in Action

Our final segment illustrates some useful implementations of XSLT. Specifically, we will create a table of contents for our HTML output. In this course you will learn how to:

  • create and apply multiple templates for the same content
  • "call" a template or "apply" a template
  • add an attribute to an element in the resulting document
  • create a table of contents

Prerequisites:

  • Intermediate HTML, or equivalent experience
  • Intro to XML or equivalent experience
  • Some programming experience is helpful but not required: understanding of variables, conditionals, and loops

Intermediate XML classes are offered at four locations::

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