Thanks so much for the suggestion! It sounds like exactly what I need- I
should have been looking at the xtags package not the xsl taglibs. I'll try
it out!
Best regards,
Richard
----- Original Message -----
From: "James Strachan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 8:28 PM
Subject: Re: dynamic xsl?
> It sounds like you want to parameterize your XSLT.
>
> e.g. using the xtags library
>
> <xtags:style xml="helpDoc.xml" xsl="myStyleSheet.xsl">
> <xtags:param name="registration"><%= request.getParameter( "reg" )
> %></xtags:param>
> </xtags:style>
>
> would do the trick, passing in the value of the "reg" parameter into the
> stylesheet as a parameter called "registration".
>
> Then in your XSLT you'll need to declare the (global) parameter then refer
> to it in XPath expressions as "$registration"...
>
> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
> xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform";>
>
> <xsl:param name="registration" />
>
> <xsl:tempate match="topics[topic = $registration]">
> <xsl:copy-of select="."/>
> </xsl:template>
>
>
> If all you need to do is extract a part of an XML document and output
either
> a fragment or bits of it, then you could just use the XTags library
> directly.
>
> e.g.
>
> <xtags:parse uri="helpDoc.xml"/>
> <xtags:copyOf select="topics[topic=$reg]"/>
>
> This would parse the XML document then evaluate the given XPath expression
> to find the section you need and then copy the resulting node set to the
JSP
> output. Notice that in XTags you can use XPath variable notation ($reg)
> inside XPath expressions to refer to 'variables'. The variable resolver
> first looks in page, request, session and application scope attributes
> first, if its not found it tries request parameters or init parameters.
>
> So in XTags you can use XPath expressions to find and compare parts of XML
> documents to Servlet attributes and parameters.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> James
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Richard A. Sand" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Monday, June 04, 2001 8:50 AM
> Subject: dynamic xsl?
>
>
> > Hi all - please excuse me if this is a stupid question. I've been
playing
> > around with the xsl tag libraries to make a simple help-system for a
> > website. I'm putting all of the site's help information into a single
XML
> > document, and then have an XSL document to take a single topic from the
> XML
> > data and display it as HTML. The problem I have is how to tell the XSL
> page
> > which help topic to display out of all of the topics contained in the
XML
> > file. The topic requested by the user is part of the query string (i.e.
> > /help/help.jsp?topic=registration).
> >
> > As a hack, my JSP page that invokes all of this reads the XML document,
> uses
> > a DOM parser to find the topic requested and outputs only that XML
> directly
> > inside an <xsl:apply> tag. The XSL file then displays whichever topic
was
> > provided. What I want to do is pass along the requested topic to the
XSL
> > page so that it can do something like:
> >
> > <xsl:tempate match="topics[topic = registration]">
> >
> > So, what I can't figure out is how to make the string "registration"
> inside
> > the xsl document be dynamically generated, so that it can contain any
> > keyword that I may have as a topic id. Furthermore, if the topic id
> doesn't
> > exist, I want to display the default topic (something that says "no help
> > available" for example).
> >
> > From what I've read of Cocoon, I can make the XML document dynamic,
> > simplifying my JSP page, but that's still not what I really need to do-
I
> > need to make the actual XSL page dynamic so that it can accept the topic
> > name from the query string (via the JSP page).
> >
> > The help file is called "help.xml" and contains various topics divided
> into
> > topic tags such as:
> >
> > <topics>
> > <topic id="registration">
> > ...
> > </topic>
> > <topic id="login">
> > ...
> > </topic>
> > <topic id="forgottenpassword">
> > ...
> > </topic>
> > </topics>
> >
> > Can someone tell me how to do this cleanly?
> >
> > Also, if anyone has seen a good thorough DTD for XML help systems like
I'm
> > writing I'd appreciate an example! Mine is pretty basic and I'm sure
this
> > has been done before.
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Richard
> >
> >
> >
>
>
