Introduction:

I am explaining the concept of transforming an XML Document using a well-defined XSLT incorporated with an Asp.Net XML Control.

W3C recommend two different style languages:
  1. CSS
  2. XLST

XSLT stands for EXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations. The XSLT language transforms XML into a format interpreted by an internet browser. Generally we use XSLT when we want to do a transformation from an XML document into another XML document or convert an XML document into a HTML web page to create dynamic web pages.

Illustrate with an Example:

In our website we create an XML document. Here we will create a CollegeXML.xml document. It contains Student->Name and Branch like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<College>
<Student>
<Name>Sandeep</Name>
 <Branch>MCA</Branch>
 </Student>
<Student>
<Name>Raviendra</Name>
 <Branch>B.Tech</Branch>
 </Student>
</College>

Now we create another document that is an XSLT document that transforms an XML document to a HTML document.

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
 xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl">
 <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>
 <xsl:template match="College">
 <h1>Student Detail</h1>
 <table border="1" bgcolor="Green" width="250">
 <xsl:for-each select="Student">
 <tr>
<td> <xsl:value-of select="Name"/> </td>
 <td><xsl:value-of select="Branch"/> </td>
 </tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Elements in XSLT:

Element

Description

<xsl:stylesheet>

It is define root element of style sheet.

<xsl:output>

It is define format of output created by style sheet. It is top level element.

<xsl:template>

It contains rules to apply when a specified node is matched.

<xsl:for-each>

It allows us to loop through multiple nodes that match the selection criteria.

<xsl:value-of>

It can be used to select the value of an XML element and add it to the output.


Table 1: Elements in XLST

Now we use an ASP.Net XML control to display this XLST information.

<asp:Xml ID="college" runat="server" DocumentSource="~/CollegeXML.xml" TransformSource="~/CollegeXLST.xslt"></asp:Xml>

Property of XML Control:

Property

Description

DocumentSource

Source of XML Document

TransformSource

Source of XSLT Document


Table 2: Property of XML Control

OUTPUT:



Note: Use CSS when you can, use XSL when you must.