Generating XSL FO

Question

Hi,

Are there any XSLT parsers (like MSXML 4.0) helping to retrieve the XSL FO document during the XSL-Transformaion Process ?

In other words, how do I get a XSL FO file from a XML and XSL file ?

Thanks, Aiwee

Answer 1

You can't automatically.

The original XSL specification was split in to 3 seperate specifications:

1. transformations (XSLT)
2. formatting/display documents (XSL:FO)
3. querying xml (XPATH)

XSL:FO should be seen as a way to describe documents in XML. XSLT can help you generate such an XML structure but it won't do so automatically.

The flow is as followed:

XML input => XSLT => XML output.

XSL:FO is XML output nothing more nothing less.

The flow is not

XML input => XSLT => XML output & XSL:FO.

I think the root of the confusion stems from the fact that the term XSL encompasses XSLT/XSLFO & XPATH yet often XSL is used as a synonym for XSLT.

w3schools has a section on how these two seperate specifications can aid one another:

http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/xslfo_xslt.asp

Answer 2

you can use a simple xml transform for this.

for example:

Source source = new StreamSource(new File("imput.xml"));
Source style = new StreamSource(new FileInputStream("style-fo.xsl"));       
TransformerFactoryImpl saxon = new TransformerFactoryImpl();
Transformer transformer = saxon.newTransformer();
transformer.transform(source, new StreamResult(System.out));

transforms the in.xml document with the xsl-fo style sheet into xml-fo and prints in on the console.