Real Life XSLT 2.0 transformations

Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:56:00 -0500

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


...

	Page 12
	



	Williamsburg,
	1850,



		
			OctrOctober 3th 1850
		
		
			Doctr S S Griffin
		 
		  
	
	...

	

...

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

This transformed the pages to what I was wanting



	
	
	Williamsburg, 1850,
	
	
		
			
			Oct^rOctober 3^th 1850
		
		
			
	...



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.

Wayne Graham's Blog - XSLT

Real Life XSLT 2.0 transformations

Williamsburg, 1850,