Question

I’m currently working on a project which uses XSL-Transformations to generate HTML from XML.
On the input fields there are some attributes I have to set.
Sample:

<input name="/my/xpath/to/node"
       class="{/my/xpath/to/node/@isValid}"
       value="{/my/xpath/to/node}" />

This is pretty stupid because I have to write the same XPath 3 times… My idea was to have some kind of post-processor for the xsl file so i can write:

<input xpath="/my/xpath/to/node" />

I’m using using something like that to transform my xml

import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;

import org.dom4j.Document;
import org.dom4j.io.DocumentResult;
import org.dom4j.io.DocumentSource;

public class Foo {

    public Document styleDocument(
        Document document, 
        String stylesheet
    ) throws Exception {

        // load the transformer using JAXP
        TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
        Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer( 
            new StreamSource( stylesheet ) 
        );

        // now lets style the given document
        DocumentSource source = new DocumentSource( document );
        DocumentResult result = new DocumentResult();
        transformer.transform( source, result );

        // return the transformed document
        Document transformedDoc = result.getDocument();
        return transformedDoc;
    }
}

My hope was that I can create a Transformer object out of a Document object. But it seems like it has to be a file path – at least I can’t find a way to use a Document directly.

Anyone knows a way to achieve what I want?

Thanks

Answer 1

My hope was that I can create a Transformer object out of a Document object. But it seems like it has to be a file path – at least I can’t find a way to use a Document directly.

You can create a Transformer object from a document object:

    Document stylesheetDoc = loadStylesheetDoc(stylesheet);
    // load the transformer using JAXP
    TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
    Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer( 
        new DOMSource( stylesheetDoc ) 
    );

Implementing loadStylesheetDoc is left as an excercise. You can build the stylesheet Document internally or load it using jaxp, and you could even write the changes to it you need as another XSLT transform transforming the stylesheet.