XSL / XSLT Editor

XSL Editor

With XSL Editor you can easily create, edit, test and validate your XSLT documents. Dragging elements from the XSLT Input view into the XSL document is a quick way of creating templates or other XSL elements.

With <oXygen/> XSL Editor you can easily create, edit, test and validate XSLT documents. The content assistant will provide the elements, attributes and attribute values specific for XSL and additionally the elements from the target document. Transformations can be configured to run the XSL you are creating.

XSL Content Assistant Shows the Output Document Elements

While creating an XSL document you are creating as output, in general, HTML, FO or another XML format. The XSL standard allows specification of the elements from the target output directly, that is you can specify something like <table> ... </table> instead of <xsl:element name="table"> ... </xsl:element>. The content assistant provided by <oXygen/> shows the elements from the target output wherever an element can be inserted. The target output document type can be easily configured from options. You can choose from XHTML, FO or you can specify the path of a custom XML Schema or DTD.

These settings define what elements are suggested by the content assistant in addition to the XSL ones.

XPath Aware Content Assistant

Editing XPath expressions for the "match", "select", or "test" attributes is not always straight forward. <oXygen/> makes this task easier by showing in Content Assistant proposal list the XPath functions and axes, all documented with sections from the W3C specifications.

If you have configured a scenario for the edited stylesheet, then the proposal list contains also the names of the elements from the input document that are currently accepted in the XPath expression.

The next image shows a list of functions. The stylesheet had the version 2.0, so the list is populated with the XPath 2.0 functions.

The next image shows how the input elements presented in the list are filtered depending on the context node.

The template selects the "personnel", the xsl:for-each selects "person" elements. The "person" element is thus the context for the evaluation of the test. The context is further changed by the partial XPath expression edited so far, the result being the "family" added to the completion list.

Allow Different Element Colors Depending on XML Prefix

This allows for instance to have the XSLT elements in a different color than the result elements, or the XML schema elements different from the elements used inside annotations.

You can add your own prefixes to the list of prefix to color mappings. In the next image, the "fo" prefix has been mapped to green.

XSLT Input Document View

This view presents the tree structure of the XML document set as input for the current stylesheet in the associated transformation scenario.

You can create templates or other XSL snippets by dragging the nodes from the tree into the stylesheet. The generated XPath expressions are context aware.

For example dragging the node "/personnel/person/name" into a xsl:template matching "person" will insert for instance an "xsl:for-each" with the select attribute equal to "name", while dragging the same node into a template matching "personnel", will set a "person/name" as value of the select attribute.

XSL Templates View

The list of templates defined in the edited XSL stylesheet is sorted and presented in the Templates View.

The sorting can be done either by name or by match. The named templates are rendered with a different icon for easy spotting.

The view represents an easy way of navigating through large XSL stylesheets. It accepts key input and searches the template having the match/name starting with the typed letters.

Support for Multiple Transformations

Multiple transformation scenarios may be created. Before transforming the current edited XSL document in <oXygen/> one must define a transformation scenario that applies to the document. A scenario is a set of values for various parameters defining a transformation. It is not tied to any particular document.

The Configure Scenario dialog is used to associate a scenario from the list of all scenarios with the edited document by selecting an entry from the list. Use the XSLT tab to specify an input XML file to be used for the transformation. You can also add XSLT parameters and append header and footer URL's for inclusion in the transformation.

After starting a transformation the button will change from "Start" to "Stop", so you can stop a time consuming transformation at any time.

Flexible Input Configuration for Transformation Scenarios

You can specify both the transformation XML source and the stylesheet locations, it is not required anymore for the edited document to be one of the transformation XML source or stylesheet. This allows editing a module and invoking a transformation on the master files.

The editor variable ${currentFile} can be used to indicate the current file.

Inline Documentation for the XSL Elements

The content completion was improved to show you the schema annotation documentation for the element and attribute proposals. <oXygen/> bundles an annotated schema for XSLT stylesheets, this way making the documentation instantly available. Together with the outliner and the model view, this new feature transforms <oXygen/> XML / XSL Editor in one of the best XSL editors available.

Support for Multiple XSL Java Transformers

You can choose between two of the most popular Java XSLT engines: Xalan and Saxon SA which are bundled with <oXygen/>. You can also configure any JAXP compliant XSLT processor and use it to perform transformations.

In this way you can easily work in development with the engine you choose for your production system. Other XSLT engines can be configured as external tools.

Support for XSLTProc and MSXML XSLT transformers

<oXygen/> can perform XSLT transformations using MSXML 3.0/4.0/.NET and XSLTProc transformers. Usually on the Windows platform any Microsoft Office application installs the MSXML 3.0 or 4.0 package. The <oXygen/> installation kit includes adapters for these transformers.

XSLTProc is part of libxslt (the XSLT C library for GNOME) and is packaged in the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux standalone <oXygen/> distributions. In case you want to use it from the Eclipse plugin, you have to copy the executable files into the plugin directory.

Additional XSLT Stylesheets

The transformation scenarios allow you to specify additional XSLT stylesheets that will be executed in cascade on the output of the main stylesheet of the scenario. It is possible to define complex scenarios that involve more than a single stylesheet, thus a single action can execute multiple XSLT transformations and eventually a FOP transformation. The list of additional XSLT stylesheets can be edited in the dialog opened by the button "Additional XSLT stylesheets".

Easy Configuration of XSLT Extensions

XSLT processor extensions are added easily with an intuitive user interface.

If you need processing functions not available in the XSLT language it is easy to configure the jars containing their implementation: edit the list of XSLT extensions available in Preferences.

The Default Scenario

If you press the Apply Transformation Scenario toolbar button and if there is no scenario associated with the edited document and the document contains a "xml-stylesheet" processing instruction referring to a XSLT stylesheet (commonly used for display in Internet browsers), then <oXygen/> will prompt asking to create a default scenario containing in the XSL URL field the URL from the href attribute of the processing instruction. This scenario has the "Use xml-stylesheet declaration" checkbox set. It uses Saxon as transformation engine and does not perform FO processing. The result is stored in a file with the same URL as the edited document except the extension which is changed to html.

Import/Export Transformation Scenarios

You can share the transformation scenarios with other <oXygen/> users. The option to Export Transformation Scenarios is used to save all the scenarios in a separate file. The file will also store the associations between document URLs and scenarios.

Preview Transformation Results

<oXygen/> offers three integrated views to show the XSLT transformation results. One is text based and will render XML or text results, other is XHTML based and will render XHTML results, the last one being able to display SVG results. You can also choose to see the transformation results in the application associated with the output file type.