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XSLT
CPS 116
Introduction to Database Systems
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Announcements
Homework #3 assigned today (October 21)
Due on November 2
Beware of QuiP quirks
A fresher alternative: Saxon-B 8.1.1 (not supported)
Both QuiP and Saxon-B 8.1.1 can be installed on your
own machine
Graded Homework #2 available
Check your score on Blackboard
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XSLT
W3C recommendation
XML-to-XML rule-based transformation language
An XSLT program is an XML document itself
Used most frequently as a stylesheet language
XSLT processor
XSLT program
Input XML Output XML
Actually, output does not need to be in XML in general
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XSLT program
An XSLT program is an XML document containing
Elements in the <xsl:> namespace
Elements in user namespace
The result of evaluating an XSLT program on an
input XML document =
the XSLT document where each <xsl:> element
has been replaced with the result of its evaluation
Uses XPath as a sub-language
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XSLT elements
Element describing transformation rules
<xsl:template>
Elements describing rule execution control
<xsl:apply-templates>
<xsl:call-template>
Elements describing instructions
<xsl:if>, <xsl:for-each>, <xsl:sort>, etc.
Elements generating output
<xsl:value-of>, <xsl:attribute>, <xsl:copy-
of>, <xsl:text>, etc.
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XSLT example
Find titles of books authored by “Abiteboul”
<?xml version=“1.0”?>
<xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl=“http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform”
version=“1.0”>
<xsl:template match=“book[author=‘Abiteboul’]”>
<booktitle>
<xsl:value-of select=“title”/>
</booktitle>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
Not quite; we will see why later
Standard header of an XSLT document
