Hello all, Let me preface this by saying that I've really enjoyed this project and everything that I've learned. I hope, time constraints under my studies permitting, that I can continue to be a community member. I'm working hard at the end to wrap it up and I think that it looks something like the final goal for this project.
Progress: I have taught myself XSLT and learned a lot about Cocoon. I've even picked up some information about SAX processing (I've really only got previous experience with DOM). Though that has little to do with the project's goals except that I have to be the achiever. I have expanded the prototype code that Bertrand gave me in fixing bugs, creating functionality that we needed for the project, and learning about the technologies. The system now can be pointed at any directory with little effort and used to create an index of doktor comments that can even be searched. The app can generate an xml stream enumerating only those snippets that correspond to the searched for key and order them in an unsatisfactory but better than no order sort of way. Problems: I am not sure of issues in ordering the items with XSLT which I will address in more detail in a moment. Hopefully I can get some feedback and ideas on how to implement that. The last thing is simply that we don't have a lot of time left and I'd like to finally publish something detailing the work as it is and as it should be using the system itself, but I'm not familiar with Forrest and even if I liked the current state of the system I doubt I could create the desired publication without guide and in time unless Forrest is far simpler than Cocoon. The ordering issues are fairly simple to describe. I can't make XSLT do what I want. Most likely because I'm not too familiar with it. I have snippets (many of them) in a file with attributes of key, type, and name. I'd like to order them by type first which I've done. The snippets that have the same name attribute, however, are related to each other and should be ordered adjacent to each other. I can't see how to get each (<snippet name="XXX">) with the same name attribute to stick together without knowing the name attributes I'm interested in beforehand. (look at ordering-neutral.xsl) The last issue I have is a bug I haven't been able to solve. Sometimes in the way of processing the comments and indexing them and them grabbing the stored fields and processing them again I lose the actual comment contents and haven't been able to locate this bug. I think Bertrand may know what the issue is, however, as I think it has something to do with the way I interact with his prototype code. Perspectives: Hopefully get some initial feedback from this email while trying to solve the three issues above. If I can't solve them I will in parallel setup comments in the code I've written that will be there so I can generate publishable documentation for the project (the goal). I will then try to use Forrest and whatever other tools to get it into a reasonable published form. The issues are in my mind from most to least important: publishing, ordering, content bug (as I think the solution to the last is simple, but hard for me to see) I'd be happy to clarify anything or provide more information. I thank anyone who looks things over in advance for it and any help/advice they may offer. Thanks, Robert Graham
