XML

IronXSLT: Visual Studio plugin

John Workman — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 01:03:12 GMT

Oleg Tkachenko has created a visual studio's plugin for XSLT. You can read all about it and get to his download from his blog: http://www.tkachenko.com/blog/archives/000703.html

Note: it only works with Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" Beta 1, and you MUST have the SDK installed.

I've downloaded all of the above and am excited about future builds of this plugin. Currently it has the ability to complie XSLT into DLLs. I'm not as interested in that as I am some of the other features to come, but we do have a few projects where I think it may come in handy.

Current list of planned and already implemented IronXSLT features includes:

XSLT Library Project (Visual Studio project type for compiling XSLT into DLL)
XSLT Refactorings
Multiple XSLT engines
XSLT Profiler
Extensive library of XSLT code snippets
XPath Intellisense
Visual XSLT builder
XSLT2XLinq and XLinq2XSLT converters

Jeni Tennison's new blog

John Workman — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:56:38 GMT

Jeni Tennison has a new blog. If you don't know who Jeni is, I would guess that you have never used XSLT. Every time I research a complex XSLT issue, I end up on a forum post where Jeni explains the solution. This is definitely a blog worth subcribing to. Thank you Jeni for sharing your thoughts, and thank you for all the help you have provided over the years.

XSLT - format date

John Workman — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 03:51:00 GMT

I had someone ask today how to format a date in xslt 1.0. I thought it was worth posting the answer I gave. I hope you find it useful. It's amazing how many lines of code it takes for this, but it's surprising fast.

convert
a date represented as "Jan-14-2006 08:55:22 (CST)" to "2006-01-14T08:55:22".

XML Sample

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<doc>
<longdate>Jan-14-2006 08:55:22</longdate>
</doc>

XSLT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"

xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">

<doc>

<xsl:element name="newdate">

<xsl:call-template name="FormatDate">

<xsl:with-param name="DateTime" select="doc/longdate"/>

</xsl:call-template>

</xsl:element>

</doc>

</xsl:template>

<xsl:template name="FormatDate">

<xsl:param name="DateTime" />

<xsl:variable name="mo">

<xsl:value-of select="substring($DateTime,1,3)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="day-temp">

<xsl:value-of select="substring-after($DateTime,'-')" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="day">

<xsl:value-of select="substring-before($day-temp,'-')" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="year-temp">

<xsl:value-of select="substring-after($day-temp,'-')" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="year">

<xsl:value-of select="substring($year-temp,1,4)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="time">

<xsl:value-of select="substring-after($year-temp,' ')" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="hh">

<xsl:value-of select="substring($time,1,2)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="mm">

<xsl:value-of select="substring($time,4,2)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:variable name="ss">

<xsl:value-of select="substring($time,7,2)" />

</xsl:variable>

<xsl:value-of select="$year"/>

<xsl:value-of select="'-'"/>

<xsl:choose>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Jan'">01</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Feb'">02</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Mar'">03</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Apr'">04</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'May'">05</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Jun'">06</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Jul'">07</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Aug'">08</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Sep'">09</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Oct'">10</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Nov'">11</xsl:when>

<xsl:when test="$mo = 'Dec'">12</xsl:when>

</xsl:choose>

<xsl:value-of select="'-'"/>

<xsl:if test="(string-length($day) < 2)">

<xsl:value-of select="0"/>

</xsl:if>

<xsl:value-of select="$day"/>

<xsl:value-of select="'T'"/>

<xsl:value-of select="$hh"/>

<xsl:value-of select="':'"/>

<xsl:value-of select="$mm"/>

<xsl:value-of select="':'"/>

<xsl:value-of select="$ss"/>

</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Cheers,

John Workman

XSLT Grouping & Muenchian Method Question

John Workman — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 01:45:00 GMT

The hardest thing you can do in XSLT is to do a multi-level grouping. I had come up with a way using the Muenchian Method and "not (preceeding::...)" to manage multi-level grouping. It did the trick, but was very inefficent.

A sharp, young developer on my team pointed me to a post by Jeni Tennison at http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200101/msg00070.html that describes a great way to efficiently handle multiple level grouping in an xml file.

The basis is to concatenate the three parts of the key to make a unique key.

<xsl:key name="GLAccount" match="Record" use="concat(@site_id, ' ', @date, ' ', @glaccount)"/>

Take a look at the above link. It's worth reading.

Cheers,
John

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