In my continued experimenting with Sablotron, I've come against what I see
as a need for a recursive sort of processing of an XML/XSL fileset.
Basically, I've got an XML data type that requires some specific logic on
the display side, so I can display different aspects of the file (one page
for everything, others for different views of selected data). Works great.
But then I've also got two output styles I'm working with (fancy and plain
HTML). So I need to duplicate all the logic for both the fancy and the
plain output XSL systems. This could start to become a problem quickly, as
whenever I decide to change the structure/content of the output, I have to
modify multiple XSL sheets.
I was wondering if there is any way to split this into two separate stages.
That is, have one style sheet to do the conversion from data-XML into my
more standard XML language for the web page. That's where all the
application-specific XSL stuff would live. That output would be another XML
file, that would then be fed into the appropriate XSL sheet for final output
rendering.
The best I can tell, Sablot's output stays as output -- that is, if I
transform XML into a new XML, that second XML set won't get processed by the
current Sablot instance. Or am I missing a key command somewhere?
Basically, I'd like to see something like this:
<RAWDAT>
<GROUP>
<NAME>This is Group A</NAME>
</GROUP>
</RAWDAT>
get translated to
<DOCUMENT>
<SECTION>
<TITLE>This is Group A</TITLE>
</SECTION>
</DOCUMENT>
which would then get changed to
<HTML> [.....]
<HR>
<H1>This is Group A</H1>
[.....]
But I'd like it to happen all in one swell foop. The alternative is to run
Sablot twice in a row, but if I do that on stuff that doesn't need the
initial conversion, then I lose all markup and get just flat text (as I'd
expect, since I don't have any XSL code to keep HTML as HTML). And what
happens when I have a need for a three-stage conversion?
Does the XSL spec support this mode of operation? If so, does Sablot? If
not (for either question), is there a good way to do this?
Thanks!
david.
