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Asked: 2026-06-13T14:37:13+00:00

I have a requirement of transforming a huge XML document into multiple HTML documents.

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I have a requirement of transforming a huge XML document into multiple HTML documents.
The XML is as follows:

<society>
  <party_members>
    <member id="1" first_name="" last_name="O'Brien">
      <ministry_id>1</ministry_id>
      <ministry_id>3</ministry_id>
    </member>
    <member id="2" first_name="Julia" last_name="">
      <ministry_id>2</ministry_id>
    </member>
    <member id="3" first_name="Winston" last_name="Smith">
      <ministry_id>1</ministry_id>
    </member>
  </party_members>
  <ministries>
    <ministry>
      <id>1</id>
      <short_title>Minitrue</short_title>
      <long_title>Ministry of truth</long_title>
      <concerns>News, entertainment,education and arts </concerns>      
    </ministry>
    <ministry>
      <id>2</id>
      <short_title>Minipax</short_title>
      <long_title>Ministry of Peace</long_title>
      <concerns>War</concerns>
    </ministry>
    <ministry>
      <id>3</id>
      <short_title>Minilove</short_title>
      <long_title>Ministry of Love</long_title>
      <concerns>Dissidents</concerns>      
    </ministry>
  </ministries>
</society>

Where potential number of party members can be quite large – millions, and number of ministries is small, around 300-400. For each of the party member there should be an output HTML with following content:

<html>  
  <body>
    <h2>Party member: Winston Smith</h2>
    <h3>Works in:</h3>
    <div class="ministry">
      <h4>Ministry of truth</h4> - Minitrue
      <h5>Ministry of truth <i>concerns</i> itself with <i>News, entertainment,education and arts</i></h5>  
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

The number of output documents should == number of party members.

I’m now struggling with XSLT, but can’t get it to work.

Please help me decide if XSLT is a good tool for this job, if it is, hint me as if how to implement it, what XSLT constructs should be used, etc.

Of course I could simply write mini transformation in a procedural language, but I’m looking for a ‘apply transformation template‘ approach, rather than procedural parsing and modification to be able to hand the template to other users for further modifications (CSS, formatting etc).

I’m using ruby + nokogiri(which is a set of bindings to libxslt), but it is possible to use any language.

If XSTL is a bad fit for this task, what other instruments can be used here, provided I must transform ~1M of users in several minutes with small memory consumption?

Additional benefit would be to be able to parallelize the processing.

Thank you.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In order to achieve this result (producing several html files) you definitely need XSLT 2.0. I suggest the usage of Saxon for that.

    Here you have a sample XSL which produces what you need (creates a single html file for each member, all inside a “html” folder in your sytem’s root, and gives back a report of what it created). You’ll probably need to tweek it a little bit to fit your needs.

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes" method="html"/>
    <xsl:variable name="target-dir" select="'/html'"/>
    <xsl:key name="ministries" match="/society/ministries/ministry" use="id"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
    <!-- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -->
    <xsl:template match="/">
        <Output>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
        </Output>
    </xsl:template>
    <!-- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -->
    <xsl:template match="*">
        <xsl:apply-templates select="*"/>
    </xsl:template>
    <!-- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -->
    <xsl:template match="member">
        <Html path="{concat($target-dir,'/',@id,'.html')}">
            <xsl:result-document href="{concat($target-dir,'/',@id,'.html')}">
                <html>
                  <body>
                    <h2><xsl:value-of select="concat('Party member: ',@first_name,' ',@last_name)"/></h2>
                    <h3>Works in:</h3>
                    <xsl:apply-templates select="ministry_id"/>
                  </body>
                </html>
            </xsl:result-document>
        </Html>
    </xsl:template>
    <!-- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ -->
    <xsl:template match="ministry_id">
    <xsl:variable name="ministry" select="key('ministries',.)"/>
    <div class="ministry">
        <h4><xsl:value-of select="$ministry/long_title"/></h4> - <xsl:value-of select="$ministry/short_title"/>
        <h5><xsl:value-of select="$ministry/long_title"/> <i>concerns</i> itself with <i><xsl:value-of select="$ministry/concerns"/></i></h5>
    </div>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

    And here you have a sample output:

    <html>
   <body>
      <h2>Party member:  O'Brien</h2>
      <h3>Works in:</h3>
      <div class="ministry">
         <h4>Ministry of truth</h4> - Minitrue
         <h5>Ministry of truth<i>concerns</i> itself with <i>News, entertainment,education and arts </i></h5>
      </div>
      <div class="ministry">
         <h4>Ministry of Love</h4> - Minilove
         <h5>Ministry of Love<i>concerns</i> itself with <i>Dissidents</i></h5>
      </div>
   </body>
</html>

    Regarding performance, several millions is a big amount of data. I guess that xsl will be enough for it, but I’m afraid you’ll need to give it a try before knowing for sure.

    I hope this helps you!

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