XSLT Development Environments

Adobe Dreamweaver

Drag & drop XML schema elements from the Bindings panel, onto the Design view, not the code view. When you do this, the statement that appears in the code view is properly tagged as <xsl:value-of select=”Bla bla bla”/>

In a repeating region, the expression for the repeated element isn’t the full-qualified name of the element. It is simply the name of the element (its local name).

<xsl:for-each select="project/file/class/property">
        <p><xsl:value-of select="name" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></p>
</xsl:for-each>

In oXygen XML Editor

Use Master Files as containers to manage housekeeping for things like intellesense (Content Completion Assistant), includes, validation, etc.

These are the XSL files that are not imported or included in other files. The files that included or imported are known as Modules. You can have multiple Master Files in your project, and each Master File can include references to files that are common to other Master Files.
As a rule of thumb, break large XSL files into multiple files, and use one of them to include the others.

Ctrl+Click on a template name in an XPath expression in an XSL file – to find out where it is included elsewhere in the project.

“Component Dependency Helper” – Click the little light bulb that appears in place of the line number.
To search for declarations and references, and to rename components.

When Creating an XSL

When you use oXygen to do this, it automatically creates an XSL file that contains all the needed namespace declarations.

When you save the XSL file, set the transformation scenario. All you have to do is select the XML file for the source (the document with the current focus will automatically become the XSL file).

You can creates templates easily by dragging and dropping nodes from the XSLT/Query Input pane!

Debugging Transformations

In the XSLT Debugger Perspective, click the blue right-arrow to run the transformation (Run), not the Run to End.

Enable XHTML output.

Then you can double-click parts of the HTML output to see where the part of the XSL file that generated it.

You can also double-click line items in the Output Mapping Stack to highlight the associated line in the XSL file.
Think of the Output Mapping Stack as a trail of breadcrumbs.

To see the transform in process, set breakpoints, and click Run.
This is better than stepping through the code, one line at a time.

Conditional Breakpoints

Open the Breakpoints tab.

You can set breakpoints that evaluate to boolean results.

Scenario-based XSLT Debugging

This allows you to specify which files to use for the input XML

From the Editor perspective, click the Debug Scenario button.

Folding

You can add “foldable”, “folded”, and “not-foldable-child” declarations to CSS rules for style selectors.

E.g.,

sect1
{
        foldable: true;
        not-foldable-child: figure;
}

figure
{
        foldable: true;
        folded: true;
        not-foldable-child: title;
}