xml-dev - Re: designing the XSLT

[Wayne Steele <xmlmaster@hotmail.com>]

>From: "Raheja, Dhruv  (TRANS)" <Dhruv.Raheja@Trans.ge.com>
>
>hi,
>      i have prepared the DTD and XML for my application. i am having some
>problems deciding how to structure the XSL  and i'm hoping someone will be
>able to guide me. my  design objective for the XSL doc is that it should be
>a generic doc that i can apply to applications (in my case i'm trying to
>design tech manuals using XML) that have the same make-up or XML/DTD
>heirarchy. i guess to make things easy for the time being i could design 
>the
>XSL in such a way that it suits my prototype document but it would 
>obviously
>be more beneficial if i could design a generic XSL that would cater to all
>the manuals that are are authored using XML. on similar lines, i have
>designed a more-or-less "generic" DTD and XML. the basic problem is that my
>DTD is rather loosely structured just so that it can be applied to any
>similar XML document.  e.g. i have the declaration:
>
><!ELEMENT activity (schematic | outline | text_description |
>visual_description | procedure | note | warning | caution)*>
>
>as you can see, any element can pretty much appear in any order and any
>number of times. e.g.  i could have  <visual_description> before a
><procedure>  or  say before a  <text_description> and i could have multiple
>ocurrences of <visual_description>. the case is the same with <note>,
><warning>, <caution> etc.
>
>this is causing a problem to me when i try and design/conceptualize a
>generic XSL because although the elements could be the same for all XML
>docs, their order/inclusion could be different for each doc. how do i
>overcome this problem? what functionality of XSL (e.g. commands) would be
>best for designing such an XSL doc?
>
>i am really hoping someone will be able to help me with this.
>
>thanks a lot,
>Dhruv

When I create XSLT stylesheets, I usually go through the following steps:
   1. create/find the source XML document
   2. Decide what the transformed document should look like
   3. create the xslt to accomplish this transform
   4. change the source document, or create a second document
   5. make sure the xslt transforms both documents to the proper output 
form.


As for elements appearing in any order, I don't see the problem this 
presents. Perhaps you could be more specific.

-Wayne Steele
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