CG0119 Web Database Systems Parsing XML: using SimpleXML & XSLT XSLT • EXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations • What is it? – w3c recommendation that applies style sheets to XML – Allows styles to be applied for outputting XML, to a web browser for instance. – Can also sort and filter data for output – Like CSS, separates formatting from content Creating the XSLT (1/6)‫‏‬

... Style sheet declaration (must be at the beginning of the file)‫‏‬ Creating the XSLT (2/6)‫‏‬

... This is optional – purely demonstrates that parameters can be used in a similar way to variables. Creating the XSLT (3/6)‫‏‬

... Declares the output method. Can also output as “xml” and “text”. Creating the XSLT (4/6)‫‏‬

... Create a template that will be applied to any part of the XML that matches the expression. “/” is the expression for the root element. Creating the XSLT (5/6)‫‏‬

... value-of is used to extract the data from a XML element or a param. XHTML can be inserted where ever required… Creating the XSLT (6/6)‫‏‬

... Selects & applies a style for every element of a node-set as defined by the expression in the „select‟ attribute. Displaying XML using XSLT in PHP // Load the XML data source $xml= simplexml_load_file('grade.xml'); // Load the XML stylesheet $xsl = simplexml_load_file('grade.xsl'); // create an xslt processor instance $proc = new XSLTProcessor; // import the xsl stylesheet into the xslt processor $proc->importStyleSheet($xsl); // Transform and output the xml data source echo $proc->transformToXML($xml); The output (unsorted)… Sorting Data using the XSLT ...

... The output (sorted)… Summary • XSLT allows style sheets to be applied to XML documents – Separates style from content – Can output as xml, html and text Use the reference on the next page. It is a good resource Recommended Reading http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/default.asp - w3schools XSLT tutorial & reference