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)
Secondly, can the StyleChooser only provide the name of the style to use
and not the actualy stylesheet file to use?
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
Consider the following pipeline
1. 2. 3. 4.
|---| |---|
|---| |---| |big| |wml|
Request - Provider - |xsp| - XSP - |xml| - XSLT - |xml| - XSLT - |htm| -
Response
|---| |---| |doc| |etc|
|---| |---|
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
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.
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?
- Is there a funky way to automagically edit the xml enroute to add
dynamic <?xml-stylesheet.. Pis?
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.
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?
Is there a definitive set of documentation on stylesheet choosing and
automating the pipeline? I've read all the tutorials I can find.
Comments appreciated,
Thanks, Tom
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