Working
with Stylesheet Splicer
Stylesheet
Splicer is a product from IBM’s Alphaworks which serves as a stylesheet
processor. It is a customizable stylesheet processor with customization
possible for the style sheets. It can manage multiple versions of stylesheets
from a common base XSLT document. Stylesheet splicer is a software that
transforms the XML document from one format to another format. The inputs
for this transformation is an XML file and and XSL file.
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Windows NT
4.0 or Windows 2000 operating system is required for the installation
of the Stylesheet Splicer. A minimum of 15 MB space is required for the
software. The software package for installation contains two self-extracting
zip files namely,
xml4C540_xlst4C17_dlls.EXE
and
stylesheet_splicer_install.EXE.
Follow the
steps given below to install the software:
1. Before
installing this software you need to create an installation directory
for the software to install. You can create a directory for the installation
and then add the directory to the PATH environment variable.
2. Then you need to add a variable and value to your environment. The
variable is XERCESC_NLS_HOME and its value has to be the installation
directory you have created for installing the software.
Note: To add a variable to the environment you can go to Settings ->
Control Panel -> System. Then select the Advanced Tab and choose the
Environment Variable… button to add a new variable and set it’s
value. As per the recommendations from XML4C, the environment is necessary,
though the software may run without the environment variable.
3. Unzip the self extracting file xml4C540_xlst4C17_dlls.EXE to the installation
directory you have created.
4. Unzip the self extracting file stylesheet_splicer_install.EXE in the
same installation directory or any directory in the PATH list.
Note: When you unzip this file make sure that you are selecting the Recreate
Subdirectories option.
5. To start the software, go to the command prompt and type “styler”.
This starts the Stylesheet Splicer software.
This software
does not create stylesheet but it assembles the different parts of the
stylesheet given as input as and when necessary to give a desired output.
Consider a scenario, where you are transforming an XML document using
a XSL file. This XML document may have different stylesheets available
and any one of the stylesheet would be used depending on the requirement.
There is
every chance that parts of an XSL file to get repeated in another XSL
file under this scenario. This is where software like Stylesheet splicer
comes in. Stylesheet splicer stores unique parts of the stylesheets as
different smaller XSL files so that these smaller XSL files are assembled
during runtime to give you the version of the document that is required
by the user. This ensures that you don’t have any duplication of
code in the XSL stylesheet. This also ensures that change management is
handled very easily when compared to the situation where you have large
XSL files for transformation of the XML documents.
During transformation
the user is prompted to select the smaller XSL files that are required
for the transformation and after selection the transformation occurs.
This gives you the desired output, since the stylesheet files are selected
during runtime. The user is prompted to select the stylesheet files through
popup windows. These popup windows also allows the user to select the
XSLT parameter values during runtime. The user is also prompted to select
the path to the DTD file so that it enables to change the DTD file also
for validating the XML document.
The Stylesheet
splicer software requires the DLLs of XML4C 5.4 and XSLT4C 1.7, which
are included in the Stylesheet Splicer package. The stylesheet splicer
software thus helps in maintaining a library of stylesheets to increase
the efficiency of transformation. Maintaining different stylesheets for
a major constraint associated with the XSLT language. This is overcome
by this software.
To work with
this software you need an XML document and a XSL stylesheet at the minimum.
The users need not know XML or XSLT for using this software. The software
has multi-document interface (MDI) windows that are used by the user to
transform an XML file. The following steps are performed to get your required
transformation of the XML document.
1. Open the
XML source document in the MDI window of the software.
Note: At this stage the user can edit the values in the XML document.
2. After editing the data in the XML document, Save it to another document.
3. Select a single XSL fle name required for the transformation.
4. Select a .BLD file to transform the XML document.
Note: A .BLD file displays the popup windows to the user to select the
segments of the XSL file that is required for the transformation of the
XML document. This .BLD file also allows the user to enter the parameter
values that are passed to the XSLT file for transformation.
5. Select a DTD file that is used for the validation of the XML document.
Only when error occurs in validation, the user is prompted about the validation,
otherwise the validation is invisible.
Thus Stylesheet
splicer is a software for dynamically selecting the XSL segments for transformation
of an XML document. This helps is producing multiple versions of XSL stylesheets
for the same XML document without duplication of XSL code.
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