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XSLT support in Mozilla

The

setStartMode()

method accepts only one argument, which is the mode to set to. Just like

addParameter()

, this must be called before

transform()

If you are going to do multiple transformations using the same style sheet, you can reset the processor

after each transformation. When you call the

reset()

method, the input and output properties are

cleared and the processor is ready to be used again:

oProcessor.reset();

Because the processor has compiled the XSLT style sheet, it is faster to make repeat transformations ver-

sus using

transformNode()

XSLT support in Mozilla

Beginning in Mozilla 1.2, a new object called

XSLTProcessor

has been available to JavaScript developers

in order to enable client-side XSLT transformations. This object uses Mozilla’s built-in XSLT processor,

Transformiix, to enable this functionality.

The first step in the transformation is to load both the XML and XSLT into DOMs:

oXmlDom.load(“employees.xml”);

oXslDom.load(“employees.xslt”);

Then, create the

XSLTProcessor

and use the

importStylesheet()

method to assign the XSLT DOM:

var oProcessor = new XSLTProcessor()

oProcessor.importStylesheet(oXslDom);

The last step is to call either

transformToDocument()

transformToFragment()

with the XML

DOM as an argument to produce a result. As you may have guessed,

transformToDocument()

returns

a new DOM document as its result and

transformToFragment()

returns a new document fragment as

its result. Generally speaking, you should use

transformToDocument()

unless you intend to add the

result directly to an existing document; then you should use

transformToFragment()

When using

transformToDocument()

, just pass in the XML DOM and use the result as another com-

pletely different DOM:

var oResultDom = oProcessor.transformToDocument(oXmlDom);

alert(oResultDom.xml);

When using

transformToFragment()

, pass in the XML DOM as well as the document you intend to

add the result to. This ensures that the new document fragment is valid in the destination document:

MSXML only supports XSLT 1.0. Development on MSXML has stopped since the

movement to the .NET framework. It is expected that, at some point in the future,

JavaScript will have access to the XML and XSLT .NET objects.

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XML in JavaScript

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