Description

This two day course covers the entire scope of the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and the XML Path Language (XPath) used for transforming structured information (e.g. XML to XML, XML to HTML, etc.). The objectives of the course are to understand the role and utility of XSLT, to overview all the XSLT constructs, to design and develop XSLT scripts, and to efficiently navigate the available documentation and resources. This course is a comprehensive study of XSLT as it covers every element, attribute, and function of the standard. Students will leave the classroom with a solid working knowledge of XSLT and will have the skill set to immediately begin implementing XSLT solutions.

For all of the advantages of tranforming XML data via XSLT, there are several challenges that organizations will have to overcome before being able to rely heavily on XSLT for data distribution. The main obstacle is often not getting the transformation templates coded correctly, but rather ensuring that the resulting XSLT code meets system performance requirements. This session explores various techniques to increase the performance of XSLT transformations. Topics include: coding XSLT for performance, avoiding common XSLT performance traps and picking the right XSLT engine. Students are encouraged to submit examples of XSLT scripts that they wish to be analyzed by the class.

One of the most powerful aspects of XML is the ability to easily translate data components from one format to another. Whether converting XML data to HTML for the Internet or to PDF for print output, XSLT plays an important part of this process. This two day class covers XSLT and the XML Path Language (XPath), used for translating XML data into other formats.

The objectives of the class are to understand the role of XSLT in XML-based systems, to overview the constructs of XSLT, to design and develop XSLT scripts for HTML and XSL-FO output and to efficiently navigate the available documentation and resources .

The first day is dedicated the use of XSLT for HTML output to the web, while the second day extends this concept by focusing on the use of XSLT to paginated output using XSL-FO. In class, pagination exercises will be conducted using Antenna House's XSL-FO rendering engine.