I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I had to quickly knock out a website today which could be updated easily. The data is very structured and heirachical. I needed other people to be able to easily update the content without tools and felt that it wasn’t really worth creating a database.
An XML file was the obvious solution, and I started using ASP.Net to render the XML into some pages. The structure was quite nested and deep so it soon got complicated and I thought maybe I should use an XSLT Stylesheet to transform the data.
Under ASP.Net its really easy. Create an XML Control
<asp:Xml runat=”server” id=”xmlTransform”></asp:Xml>
And then set the XML and XSLT File (in this case in code)
With xmlTransform
.DocumentSource = “Resources/Source.xml”
.TransformSource = “Transform.xslt”
End With
I had to do a bit of googling to reacquaint myself with the XSLT commands but only took a few minutes to get back up to speed (its been a few years).
XSLT allows you to easily reach in and grab the bits of XML data you need. Changes to the XML data or XSLT formatting does not require a recompile.
Too easy!
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