XSLT Exercise 7

The texts

For this assignment, we set you free to write XSLT on your own project XML files. You may select XML from any of the project teams this semester, but we will be especially pleased to see you do something interesting with your own project files to begin building interesting and useful website material for your projects.

The assignment

You may use your own XML files or someone else’s. Select an XML file and take some time to review it to make sure you understand its overall structure. (Notice whether it’s in a namespace and change your stylesheet template accordingly!) If you are not working with your own project code, visit the project site to learn more about the general project. Download an XML file from whichever project you choose into <oXygen/>.

Advice in case you need it: Downloading files from other teams' GitHub repos

The easiest way to download a file from GitHub is to clone the project onto your own machine, which will copy all files, and then open the file you need. If you want to download just one file (which is all you need for this assignment), you can’t just right-click and download because you’ll download a version with extraneous GitHub specific markup mixed into the file, which will render the file unusable for your purposes. What you can do instead is

1. Connect to the repo in a browser;
2. Click on the file you want, which will display its contents;
3. Click on the button labeled Raw at the top of the code window, which will display its contents without any extraneous GitHub-specific material; and
4. Either right-click and do a Save as or select all the text in the window, copy it to the clipboard, and paste it into a new XML document in <oXygen/>.

What to do with the file or collection once you’ve downloaded it

Transform the XML into some form of HTML using XSLT, whether that’s a reading view or some sorts of lists or tables or other reports. You should decide yourself on the type of output you would find interesting or useful, but so that you’ll gain practice with some of the techniques we’ve introduced recently, your transformation must require meaningful use of at least two of the following:

• Conditional: an <xsl:if> and/or <xsl:choose> statement(s) (see XSLT, part 2: conditionals and push and pull)
• An <xsl:for-each> statement (see XSLT, part 2: conditionals and push and pull)
• Attribute value templates (see Attribute value templates (AVT))
• Modal XSLT (see Modal XSLT)
• Linking (see XSLT Exercise 6)

Please upload your input XML, your XSLT, your output HTML, and (if applicable), your CSS to CourseWeb. If your HTML is styled with CSS be sure that your XSLT generates the necessary <link> element inside HTML document, and upload the CSS file along with the XSLT.