Tom Howe wrote:
Hi good folks of Axkit, I've been using axkit for a couple of years now and am planning to migrate from XPathScript to XSLT. I had to add a bunch of features to XPathScript to get it to give me nested components with their own stylesheets and am just planning out how I can do this using XSLT.
The trouble I am having is trying to get my head around the Stylesheet Choosing mechanisms, in the past I did this outside of Axkit and to be honest it was a bit messy so im trying to figure out what the "best" way is.
Firstly, am I right in thinking that the AxStyleChooser only runs once per request? (and not at each segment of the pipe)
Correct.
Secondly, can the StyleChooser only provide the name of the style to use and not the actualy stylesheet file to use?
Also correct. StyleChooser Plugins are expected to select the unique *name* associated with an <AxStyleName> block.
Thirdly, what I would like to do is have some module/code/chooser whatever make a decision about which stylesheet to apply whenever an XSLT stylesheet needs to be applied.
Ideally I could say something like,
1. Apply XSP 2. Apply XSLT - goes and checks stylechooser for stylesheet to apply 3. Apply XSLT - goes and checks stylechooser for stylesheet to apply 4. Return to browser
AxKit really doesn't work this way; it presumes that all the styles that will be appled are know *before* the content is passed into the style processing chain.
1. AxProvider finds the correct XSP file
2. XSP file is executed
3. Common XSLT stylesheet is applied that pulls in other components
required for the page (menus etc) making one big xml/xhtml doc
4. Look/feel XSLT stylesheet(s) are applied
What im trying to work out is how best to handle stage 3 and 4. There are plenty of different factors that could determine which stylesheet(s) to use. Eg. - Printable version - Localised Country/Sites - ReBranding - User Preference - Browser/Device dependant - Accessibility
Each one of these may be set up as a seperate <AxStyleName> block and selected at request-time via a StyleChooser module. Remeber that a StyleChooser (like all AxKit Plugins) have full access to the Apache request object, so, most of the time you can easily determine the state that is associated with a given style.
My concern is where best to make the decision as to which stylesheet(s)
need to be applied. The default seems to be to list them one after the
other within your XML file as <?xml-stylesheet PIs. This seems awkward
because it assumes you know which stylesheets may be applied when you
create the XML document.
No, xml-stylesheet Processing Instructions are *not* the prefered way to configure AxKit's styleing rules. named styles and media (used in conjuntion with StyleChooser and MediaChooser modules and other standard Apache configuration directives) off far more flexibility.
My two options seem to be either
A) Find a way to work out which stylesheets to apply and then apply them
in the correct order. - Can I use StyleChooser for this?
Yes.
- Is there a funky way to automagically edit the xml enroute to add dynamic <?xml-stylesheet.. Pis?
You don't need to; see the styling configuration directives instead.
B) Apply all possible stylesheets one after the other, checking within each stylesheet whether it needs to be applied and passing on anything it doesn't recognise. This still means that if I want to change the stylesheets to be applied then I have to re-edit every file again.
Again, don't use xml-stylesheet PIs. they are there (at best) for very simple set-ups and create a real mess for more sophisticated sites.
My feeling is to want to avoid putting the references to the stylesheet files within the XSP/XML files since the data could be useful in many situations so all sorts of stylsheets might need to be applied to the data. Sometimes circumstances might require modifying the pipeline on the fly, adding or removing XSLT processing stages, how would one go about this?
You cannot (sanely|easily) alter the stylesheet processing chain once it starts. While 90% of the time, you don't really need to, this is one issues we hope to address in AxKit2, if possible.
Is there a definitive set of documentation on stylesheet choosing and automating the pipeline? I've read all the tutorials I can find.
Chapter 4 of _XML Publishing with AxKit_ [1] covers all of the gory details about the stylesheet processing chain and how to (ab)use it.
Cheers, -kip
[1] http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/0596002165
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