transforming generated XML with XSL

Anon

Hello,

I'm working on a web shop for distribution. Since every client needs a unique design, XSL seems to be perfect. The shop produces XML, and the server transforms it using an XSL. Wonderful!

So I started searching. I found out that only some IE5 browsers can do such transformations, and that the common way is server software. CPAN modules, cocoon (Apache), Sablotron, and a lot more.
So I browsed all the articles, forums, everything and I came to one conclusion:

There seems to be NO WAY to transform generated XML. I found only one solution in one of the articles here on phpbuilder: Saving it as a .xml file, and redirecting towards it.

Probably most of you will agree when I say that solution stinks.

Sablotron seems the most promising. Just call the function and insert some filenames. But yet again, the filenames suck. No sessions, no form-data, no nothing except for temporary files maybe to make my shop work.

Is there anyone out there who came up with a solution without .xml files???

Thanx!

[deleted]

XML, XSL, it's all templates...
so why not save yourself a lot of headaches and use templates? :-)

Anon

Gee you're funny!

Cause XSL saves me a lot of garbage in the code, output is easyer to read, cause there aren't thousands of ...<tr></td>... tags in my code or loose files with fragments of HTML that need to be read. Perfect for debugging and re-designs, and no danger of accidentally destroying some code while implementing design number 8. Just tags that say things like 'this is a product' and 'here ends the product' and 'this is product number 8 and here I die because...', without having to remove diagnostic info or translating errors to user language.

[deleted]

And templates give you.... hmm.. exactly the same?

Anon

Hi ,

It would be cool if you can generate a .XML file.

I understand your feeling towards flat files.
Ideally you should be using Xalan for XSLT and provide a .xsl for each client and use the XSLT of xalan to tranform the XML for each client.

What you would achieve here is that you are separating data and presentation. You can have your data as a .XML and use any .xsl for any client as kind of a stylesheet which could give many views to your data.

If you need to get xalan go to apache.org