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XSLT template inspector

Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2017 6:01 pm
by Patrik
Hi,

this is more a vague idea than a request, but it might be usefull...

While the template pattern mechanism of XSLT is very comfortable to extend it has the same deficit as CSS has: On large projects it is difficult to maintain the overview which template will match (first) on a specific node. For instance on the PDF transformation for DITA-OT you can spend quite some time on finding the right template you need to overwrite.

For CSS you have already provided the CSS inspector which helps a lot when modifying your stylesheets. And I could imagine this would also be the case for XSLT.

So the idea would be that you can place the cursor on some XML node and have an XSLT-file (or project) selected. Now oXygen will display for each mode (e.g. in different tabs) the list of templates that would match this node - ordered by their priority, considering includes and imports, default priority, default templates, ...

As I said: just an uidea you might think about.

Patrik

Re: XSLT template inspector

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2017 8:42 am
by Radu
Hi Patrik,

We'll consider this although XSLT is complex and this can probably be done only if we run a transformation to the end and somehow retain all places in the XSLT where the XML element was processed.
The closest we have to this if you use our XSLT debugger and run the debugger to end is that you can move the caret in the "Output" tab and see which parts of XML and XSLT were used to generate it.

Regards,
Radu