Appendix A. Transformations in Oxygen

To transform a XML file in the Oxygen application, you need to create a transformation scenario.

If you have not transformed any files yet, there will probably be no scenario available. In this case, you need to create one first. Follow these steps :

• Click on the "Configure Transformation Scenario" button. It has an icon with a spanner and a small red triangle (see image on the right).
• In the window that pops up, click on "New". Another window appears. In the top of the new window, you can see a text field in which you can enter a name for the scenario that you are about to create. Type, for instance, "Transformation1". This is the name that will appear in the "Configure Transformation Scenario"-window. This window contains three tabs :
  1. Click on the tab which is marked "XSLT". This screen contains a the text field which is labelled "XSLT URL", and here you can select the stylesheet that you want to use. Click on the "open"-button to navigate to your stylesheet. Note that you also have the option in this screen to select an XSLT-processor. The default processor is Saxon. For basic transformations, choosing a different processor will have very little to no effect on the outcome. It is only when you include a number of more advanced features of XSLT that you might begin to notice a few differences.
  2. The middle tab is used for transformations which use scripts that contain XSL:FO. As this is not the case for our current stylesheet, you can ignore this middle tab for now.
  3. The third (rightmost) tab allows you to name the output file. After "Save as", type in the name that you would like to give to your HTML-file (e.g. output.html). If you do not specifiy a path, Oxygen will automatically save the output in the same directory as the stylesheet and the XML-file. If you select the "Open in browser" option, Oxygen will load the result of the transformation in your Internet browser.
• Click on "OK" in the current window to switch back to the the underlying window (the "Configure Transformation Scenario"-window). Having checked that the scenario that you have just created appears in the list and that it is selected, click on "OK" to close this window.

If a scenario is available and if it has been configured correctly, you can execture the transformation by clicking on the "Apply Transformation"-button which is marked by a red arrow (see illustration). If the transformation is sucessful, an new html-file will have been created in the directory that you had specified.

Browser transformations

An XSLT-transformation can also be performed by a browser that supports XSL. This is the case for, for example, Firefox, and for Internet Explorer version 5 and higher. The Microsoft XSLT implementation is called MSXSL.

To transform the file, add a link in the XML file to the XSLT-file, immediately after the XML-declaration :

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="stylesheet.xsl"?>

If you open the xml-file in a browser that supports XSL, you will see not the full XML file, but a representation of this file based on the specifications in the stylesheet transformation.xsl.