XSL and XSLT Course in San Francisco Bay Area

This XSL course is the last two days of the five-day XML training course, but it can be taken independently of the five-day package.

You are currently working with XML - maybe you've defined a language with a DTD, maybe you're editing XML documents regularly, or maybe you're prototyping a project - but you need to expand your knowledge of the W3C XML languages. The Intermediate client-side XML class examines XPath and XSLT. 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 Extensible Style Language

XSL or Extensible Style Language is really a collection of several different languages including XSLFO and XSLT incorporating XPath. Because of the complexity of XSLFO, we focus on XSLT and 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
modelling 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:

establishing XSLT templates
basic XPath for designating matches
how to extract data from XML elements to be placed in the templates
how to extract data from XML element attributes
how to use a simple XSL processor
how to define the output type for your new document
to transform XML to text
to transform XML to HTML
about applying all applicable templates
about selecting specific templates for application

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 REGEX 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 (sub) sort 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 course you will learn:

how to specify a context, parent, child and attribute node
some valuable XPath functions
how to count the number of items in a node-set
how to perform basic math functions on numerical data
how to generate id's for each node in a node-set
about using XPath to determine the element node's name and whether it has content
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
when to call a template and when to apply a template
how to add an attribute to an element in the resulting document
how to create a table of contents

Prerequisites:

Intermediate HTML or equivalent experience
Intro to JavaScript or equivalent experience
Intro to XML or equivalent experience

keywords: XML training san francisco bay area (XML Fundamentals) XML classes san francisco bay area (XML Advanced / Schema)

XML Course