Include user control .ascx into xslt - xslt

I've created .ascx user control and I'm trying to find a way for including it into xslt rendering. How can I do this? I'm doing it for Sitecore. I thought maybe create a placeholder, but placeholders cannot be defined in renderings. I appreciate any help you can provide.

It's not possible to include ASCX file into xslt file because: XSLT transforms XML to HTML or to XML or to plain text but not to ASP.NET pages.
You can include xslt file into ascx but not ascx into xslt file. The best way is to change your xslt file into ascx file, and to include there with placeholders or directly .
I'd suggest to avoid using XSLT.
They seem pretty easy to use, but it's really hard to refactor the code.

Well, it's not possible to call user controls(.ascx) directly from XSLT files. However depending upon what you want to achieve, you can call .net methods, called XSLT extension methods, from XSLT file. For instance, you may need to write code similar to below to call custom .Net GetData() method.
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:customObject="urn:yourNamespace">
<new-data>
<xsl:value-of select="customObject:GetData()"/>
</new-data>
...
Of course the type needs to be registered before it can be used. Type registration can be done into web.config or dynamically by calling AddExtensionObjectMethod of XSLTArgumentList class.
Sitecore offers XSLT extension controls too and unlike extension methods, it isn't a .net feature. XSL extension controls are XML elements in XSL renderings that correspond to .NET classes. For example, the XSL extension control corresponds to the
Sitecore.Web.UI.XslControls.Text .NET class. It will be consumed something like this in XSLT file:
XSL extension controls are standalone elements in the XSL code.
To register a custom type, add following to element in web.config:
<extension mode="on" type="NamespaceName.ClassName, AssemblyName" namespace="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" singleInstance="true"/>
Reference: http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/64/presentation_component_xsl_reference_sc62-64-a4.pdf

Related

Can I force the XSLT collection function to treat all files as XSL?

I'm currently building an XSLT stylesheet used to document other XSLT stylesheets in a series of folders and sub-folders. My code pulls out specific details about variables, functions, etc and renders it in an output format. The sheets being read are created by a 3rd party product. Most of them have an XSL extension but some of them are proprietary extensions. I have some files with a DTCBS extension but they are just XSL stylesheets.
I'm currently loading the content of these files into a variable using the XSLT function "collection" as follows:
<xsl:variable name="Collection" select="collection(concat('file:///', encode-for-uri(replace($filePath, '\\', '/')),'?select=*.(xsl|dtcbs|xml);recurse=yes'))" as="node()*"/>
The variable works just fine if I use XSL|XML. But if I include the DTCBS extension, the variable blows up citing "the supplied value is xs:base64Binary".
If I manually put the xml declaration line at the top of my DTCBS file, the variable works fine. Those DTCBS files are auto-generated without the declaration line so I can't fix that, nor can I manually edit them each time I want to run my documenter code.
From what I can tell, because it's not an XSL extension, and the XML declaration line isn't present, the XSLT parser thinks it's base64 when it isn't.
I'm using Saxon as my XSLT parser and the Saxon documentation says it uses file extensions and http headers to detect the file type.
Does anyone know if there is a way to force collection() to treat every file as an XSL?
Tried adding the XML declaration line in the DTCBS file. This did correct the issue but I can't do this in all cases as I am trying to automate the entire thing.
I also renamed the DTCBS extension to XSL and the problem went away as well.
As well as Martin's suggestion, you can register content types with the Saxon configuration:
processor.getUnderlyingConfiguration()
.registerFileExtension("dtcbs", "application/xml");
This has been available since Saxon 9.7.
Try to add e.g. content-type=application/xml e.g. '?select=*.(xsl|dtcbs|xml);recurse=yes;content-type=application/xml'.

Cannot include sub xsl files within main xsl file based on if statement [duplicate]

The <xsl:import> and <xsl:include> elements seem to behave quite specific.
What I am trying to do:
<xsl:import href="{$base}/themes/{/settings/active_theme}/styles.xsl" />
I want to allow loading different themes for my application. I have a settings in my App which stores the "currently active theme" folder name in a xml node.
Unfortunately the code above won't work.
Does anybody know about a workaround to achieve what I want to do?
edit:
just confirmed with a XSLT guru via Twitter... there's no nice way of doing this. Easiest solution in my case will probably be to seperate frontend and backend stylesheets and load them individually to the XSLTProcessor...
xsl:import assembles the stylesheet prior to execution. The stylesheet can't modify itself while it is executing, which is what you are trying to achieve.
If you have three variants of a stylesheet for use in different circumstances, represented by three modules A.xsl, B.xsl, and C.xsl, then instead of trying to import one of these into the module common.xsl that contains all the common code, you need to invert the structure: each of A.xsl, B.xsl, and C.xsl should import common.xsl, and you should select A.xsl, B.xsl, or C.xsl as the principal stylesheet module when initiating the transformation.
What I am trying to do:
<xsl:import href="{$base}/themes/{/settings/active_theme}/styles.xsl" />
This isn't allowed in any version (1.0, 2.0, or 3.0) of XSLT.
In XSLT 2.0 (and up) one may use the use-when attribute, but the conditions that may be specified are very limited.
One non-XSLT solution is to load the importing XSLT stylesheet as an XmlDocument and use the DOM API to set href attribute to the really wanted value -- only then invoke the transformation.

Is it possible to generate both HTML and Wiki markup at the same time using XSLT?

I would like to generate both HTML and Wiki markup at the same time using XSLT (from an XML source document) - just wondering if it's possible. It would be nice if I could use the same XSLT to do both rather than writing/maintaining two separate files.
The HTML report will be for general viewing, and the Wiki markup will be published to Confluence.
If you want to create more than one result document using a single stylesheet than XSLT 2.0 and later support that using xsl:result-document, see the specification http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt20/#creating-result-trees. As you then want to process the same elements twice, you usually also make use of modes to separate the different processing, e.g. use one mode to produce HTML, the other mode to produce Wiki markup.
With pure XSLT 1.0 you can only create a single result document, however, some XSLT 1.0 processors, like Xalan (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/extensions_xsltc.html#redirect_ext) or xsltproc (http://exslt.org/exsl/elements/document/index.html) support an extension to create more than one result document.

use javascript (or JQuery) in a standalone HTML file to select an XML and transform

I need a way to transform XML to HTML (using XSL) but without a server. So, I want to create a standalone HTML file (with hardcodes XSL path and name).
Allow the user to select an XML
Transform it with the XSL and display results in browser
Original XML cannot be changed (so cannot just embed XSL in XML)
Is this possible? Everything I found requires post, but I'm not using a server
Regards
Mark
Yes, it's possible. And you don't need javascript to do it, but you can use javascript if you want.
Just look at the previous (XSLT question)[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12964917]
Use a processing-instruction like...
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="soccer.xslt"?>
Refer:
Direct linkage through pi: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-stylesheet/
Transform through javascript:
http://dev.ektron.com/kb_article.aspx?id=482
Calling XSLT from javascript

preproccesing in XSLT

is it at all possible to 'pre-proccess' in XSLT?
with preprocessing i mean updating the (in memory representation) of the source tree.
is this possible, or do i need to do multiple transforms for it.
use case:
we have Docbook reference manuals for out clients but for certain clients these need different 'skins' (different images etc). so what i was hoping to do is transform the image fileref path depending on a parameter. then apply the rest of the normal Docbook XSL templates.
Expanding on Eamon's answer...
In the case of either XSLT 1.0 or 2.0, you'd start by putting the intermediate (pre-processed) result in an <xsl:variable> element, declared either globally (top-level) or locally (inside a template).
<xsl:variable name="intermediate-result">
<!-- code to create pre-processed result, e.g.: -->
<xsl:apply-templates mode="pre-process"/>
</xsl:variable>
In XSLT 2.0, the value of the $intermediate-result variable is a node sequence consisting of one document node (was called "root node" in XSLT/XPath 1.0). You can access and use it just as you would any other variable, e.g., select="$intermediate-result/doc"
But in XSLT 1.0, the value of the $intermediate-result variable is not a first-class node-set. Instead, it's something called a "result tree fragment". It behaves like a node-set containing one root node, but you're restricted in how you can use it. You can copy it and get its string-value, but you can't drill down using XPath, as in select="$intermediate-result/doc". To do that, you must first convert it to a first-class node-set using your processor's node-set() extension function. In Saxon 6.5, libxslt, and 4xslt, you can use exsl:node-set() (as in Eamon's answer). In MSXML, you'd need to use msxsl:node-set(), where xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt", and in Xalan, I believe it's called xalan:nodeset() (without the hyphen, but you'll have to Google for the namespace URI). For example: select="exsl:node-set($intermediate-result)/doc"
XSLT 2.0 simply abolished the result tree fragment, making node-set() unnecessary.
This is not possible with standards compliant XSLT 1.0. It is possible in every actual implementation I've used, however. The extensions with which to do that differ by engine, however. It is also possible in standard XSLT 2.0 (which is in any case much easier to work with - so if you can, just use that).
If your xslt processor supports EXSLT, the exsl:node-set() function does what you're looking for. msxml has an identically named extension function as well (but with a different namespace uri, the functions are unfortunately not trivially compatible).
Since you are trying to generate slightly different output from the same DocBook XML source, you might want to look into the "profiling" (conditional markup) support in DocBook XSL stylesheets. See Chapter 26 in DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide by Bob Stayton:
Profiling is the term used in DocBook
to describe conditional text.
Conditional text means you can create
a single XML document with some
elements marked as conditional. When
you process such a document, you can
specify which conditions apply for
that version of output, and the
stylesheet will include or exclude the
marked text to satisfy the conditions.
This feature is useful when you need
to produce more than one version of a
document, and the versions differ in
minor ways.
For example, to use different images for, say, Windows and Mac versions of the same document, you might have a DocBook XML fragment like this:
<figure>
<title>The Foo dialog</title>
<mediaobject>
<imageobject os="windows">
<imagedata fileref="screenshots/windows/foo.png"/>
</imageobject>
<imageobject os="mac">
<imagedata fileref="screenshots/mac/foo.png"/>
</imageobject>
</mediaobject>
</figure>
Then, you would use the profiling-enabled versions of the DocBook XSL stylesheets with the profile.os parameter set to windows or mac.
Maybe you should use XSLT "OOP" methods here. Put all the common templates to all clients in a stylesheet, and create an stylesheet for each client with specific templates overriding common ones. Import the common stylesheet within the specific ones with xsl:import, and you'll do only one processing by calling the stylesheet corresponding to a client.