IBM Version 5 manual Create an XSL from scratch, Generating XSL from Xhtml

Create an XSL from scratch

Creating an XSL from scratch is also useful. The XSL Editor provides a number of wizards to help you create the content in your stylesheet. This section is describing how you can create an XSL stylesheet from scratch to format the xml data into an HTML table.

To create an HTML document, we will add a template to generate HTML header information as well as to define the output method for the document:

1.Position the cursor to an empty line after the <xsl:stylesheet> element in the html.xsl file.

2.In the menu bar, select XSL->HTML Template. This will create an <xsl:output> element that will output the result in HTML, and a template that will emit an HTML header with an <xsl:apply-templates>rule to will process all the immediate children in the passengerList.xml file.

Next, we will create a template that will produce an HTML table:

1.Position the cursor to an empty line after the </xsl:template>.

2.In the menu bar, select XSL->HTML Table. This will bring up the XSL Table Wizard.

3.Select the Flight element as the context node for building the HTML table. This implies that all the children of the Flight element will be added as columns in the table.

4.Check the Wrap table in a template check box to indicate that we want to wrap this table in a new template.

5.Check the Include Header check box to indicate that we want to include a header in this table.

6.Optionally, click Next to go to the next page to add a table border and background color for the table.

7.Click Finish. This will create a new Flight template in your html.xsl file that will produce an HTML table.

Generating XSL from XHTML

This will enable you to separate out the presentation logic from the dynamic data in an existing HTML document. It extracts the data into an XML file and the presentation data into two XSL files. Once the separation is completed, you can use XSLT technology to combine new data that is defined in XML format with the generated XSL files to create new HTML Web pages. To use this technology requires the following steps:

1.Prepare the HTML file for generation by converting it into a well-formed XML file with a .xhtml extension.

188 The XML Files: Development of XML/XSL Applications Using WebSphere Studio