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Real Life XSLT 2.0 transformations

Posted At : August 23, 2006 11:56 AM
Related Categories: XSLT,Web,ColdFusion,XML

I ran into a bit of a situation that was really blowing my mind. I have a rather large XML file (around 20,000+ lines) marked up in TEI that I wanted to do some transformations on (a day book and ledger from the 1850s). Essentially the code follows the format

...
<figure>
   <head>Page 12</head>
   <graphic url="0023_p12"/>
</figure>

<fw type="header" place="top-center">
   <name type="place" key="7022220">Williamsburg</name>,
   <date value="1850">1850</date>,
</fw>

<table>
   <row>
      <cell>
         <date value="1850-10-03"><choice><abbr>Oct<hi rend="sup;underline">r</hi></abbr><expan>October</expan></choice> 3<hi rend="sup">th</hi> 1850</date>
      </cell>
      <cell>
         <name type="person" key="griffss01">Doct<hi rend="sup;underline">r</hi> S S Griffin</name>
       </cell>
       <cell> </cell>
   </row>
   ...
</table>
<pb/>
...

What I wanted to accomplish was group all this together in separate divs for HTML output (ok, I actually need to write each page to its own file, but this is pretty much just one more step).

I just could not find a way to group this info this way using XSLT 1 without wrapping each page within its own div structure. I didn't really want to go back and do this, so I asked the TEI-L list. David Sewell pinged me back with some XQuery code that recursively recalls the document structure for a given node.

He also mentioned that it would be pretty easy to write an XSLT 2 transformation that groups these nodes together. I did a little bit of digging and came up with

<xsl:template match="tei:div">
   <xsl:for-each-group select="*" group-ending-with"tei:pb">
      <div class="page">
          <xsl:apply-templates select="current-group()" />
      </div>
   </xsl:for-each-group>
</xsl:template>

This transformed the pages to what I was wanting

<div class="page">
   <img src="0023_12.png" alt="Page 12" />

   <h1 class="fw">Williamsburg, 1850,</h1>

   <table>
      <tr>
         <td>
         <span class="abbr">Oct<sup><u>r</u></sup></span><span class="expan">October</span> 3<sup>th</sup> 1850</date>
      </td>
      <td>
         <a href="javascript:getName('griffss01');>Doct<sup><u>r</u></sup> S S Griffin</a>
       </td>
       <td> </td>
   </row>
   ...
</table>
</div>

<div class="page">
   ...
</div>

The XSLT processor for ColdFusion doesn't support XSLT 2.0 (it's still a draft spec). However, Saxon does (specifically Saxon 8). For more on doing XSLT transformations, see XSLT 2.0 in ColdFusion.