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Re: [xsl] What is the best approach for doing.....

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Hi David,

> In general editing an XML source by editing its transformed view (eg
> html) is clearly not possible although in some constrained cases this is
> doable. Without knowing the input format and how constrained the editor
> is, it's hard to know if it makes sense.

OK, I probably didn't explain myself properly because I am running around 
in circles a bit at the moment.

I am trying to produce an application that does a mail merge to produce 
legal documents (will related).

One part of the application gathers the data and saves it into a database, 
from where it can be extracted as XML.

I have a number of mail merge templates that are currently as Wordperfect 
docs containing HotDocs merge codes and all the legal clauses we need.

In order to do the merging I was going to convert the merge templates into 
XSLT and to a transform using the XML data to produce the  final legal 
document in XHTML format.

Since we are working with legal documents, every paragraph has to be 
numbered, so I was planning on using numbered lists that would be nested 
down to about 3 levels so we would be aiming for numbering in form of 1, 
2, 3, 3(i), 3(ii), 3(iii)(a), 3(iii)(b), etc.

Some of the paragraphs/clauses contain references to the number of others. 
 For example we might have a paragraph as follows:

3(iii)(b) Except in cases covered by 3(iii)(a) all monies should go to xyz 
charity.

Now, I think that achieve this via the feedback I have had so far.

I suppose what I want to know is once the XSLT has been transformed into 
XHTML and then edited by a user, is there any way to use XSL to parse the 
XHTML to check/update the references.

It is worth noting that whilst the user may be adding in extra paragraphs 
they wont be adding in any of their own cross references and shouldn't be 
deleting any existing ones.

Does that make any more sense?
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Cheers,

Julian Voelcker
United Kingdom

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