What Is XSLT (XSL Transformations)

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∟XSLT (XSL Transformations) Introduction

∟What Is XSLT (XSL Transformations)

This section describes XSLT (XSL Transformations) - a language that allows you to write a stylesheet to describe rules for transformation a source XML document into a result text document. 'stylesheet', 'template' and 'apply-templates' are 3 basic XSLT statements.

What Is XSLT (XSL Transformations)? XSLT is a language that allows you to write a stylesheet to describe rules for transformation a source XML document into a result text document.

XSLT is a language based on XML, so a transformation stylesheet written in XSLT is also an XML document. XSLT statements are expressed as XML elements.

There are 3 basic elements in an XSLT stylesheet:

"stylesheet": Declaring an XSLT stylesheet.
"template": Declaring an XSLT transformation template with a pattern and a result text. When an element in the source XML document matches the pattern, the result text will be inserted into the result document.
"apply-templates": Used inside an "template" element, making a call to apply XSLT transformation on other source elements. The result text of this call will be merged as into the result text of the current template.

Here is a simple XSLT stylesheet with 3 XSLT elements:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
 <xsl:template match="class">
  Start of student list
  <xsl:apply-templates select="student"/>
  End of student list
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Note that:

This stylesheet provides only 1 template which describes how the source element "class" should be transformed.
As part of the result text of the "class" template, an "apply-templates" element is used to call the transformation engine to transform "student" elements from the source XML document.