Java(TM) Boutique - Working with JDOM, XPath and XSLT

Tutorials : Working with JDOM, XPath and XSLT :

XSLT

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents. Again, w3schools is a fine place to start if you're not familiar with XSLT yet. XSLT uses XPath for matching the elements in a source document that should be transformed (into a result document).

Here's an example of a stylesheet, dvds.xsl, which can be used to transform the dvds.xml file to an HTML file:

Listing 4: The dvds.xsl stylesheet

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
  <body>
    <h2>My DVD Collection</h2>
    <table border="1">
      <tr bgcolor="lightblue">
      <th align="left">Id</th>
      <th align="left">Title</th>
      <th align="left">Length</th>
    </tr>
<xsl:for-each select="collection/dvd">
    <tr>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="@id"/></td>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td>
      <td><xsl:value-of select="length"/></td>
    </tr>
</xsl:for-each>
    </table>
  </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Notice the XPath expressions: "collection/dvd", "@id", etc.

It's possible to let browsers like MSIE v. 6 or Mozilla Firebird do the transformation if we simply add the stylesheet to the dvds.xml file--like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="dvds.xsl"?>
<collection>
. . .

In one of these browsers the XML file will appear like this:

Figure 3: Browser view

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