Initiate XSLT in a Script

MSXML 5.0 SDK

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Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 5.0 for Microsoft Office - XSLT Developer's Guide

Initiate XSLT in a Script

Currently, the default XML parser for Internet Explorer is MSXML 2.0 or MSXML 3.0, depending on the version of Internet Explorer. With the help of the xmslinst.exe utility, you can change the default parser to MSXML 2.6 or MSXML 3.0. However, this can often cause unintended side-effects for some applications. Therefore, such a practice is not enabled for MSXML versions 4.0 and later.

Until Internet Explorer ships with MSXML 4.0 or later as its default XML parser, the MSXML 4.0 and later features are available in Internet Explorer only via scripting, when an XML DOM object is instantiated using the MSXML4-specific ProgID. This means that you cannot use <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="Products.xsl"?> in an XML document to invoke MSXML 4.0 functionality.

However, you can write either server-side or client-side script to use MSXML 5.0 instead. In this SDK, we provide two ways to do this:

The following examples illustrate each method. You can use the code in these examples to test other samples in this SDK. Just change the XML and XSLT file names as appropriate.

Initiate XSLT from an HTML Page

Example

When the following HTML page is loaded, the init() function is invoked. This function loads the hello.xml and hello.xsl files into XML DOM objects: srcTree and xsltTree, respectively. It then applies the XSLT transformation by calling the transformNode method on the scrTree XML DOM object.

You can use this HTML page to test many of the other XSLT examples in this SDK, as well. You might want to use this approach if the output of the transformation is HTML. Otherwise, use the other approach, Initiate XSLT from a Command Prompt.

For hello.xml and hello.xsl, see Hello, World! (XSLT). The following is the code for the HTML page, hello.htm.

hello.htm

<HTML>
<HEAD>
  <TITLE>sample</TITLE>
  <SCRIPT language = "javascript">
     function init()
     {
        var srcTree = new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.5.0");
        srcTree.async=false;
        // You can substitute other XML file names here.
        srcTree.load("hello.xml"); 

        var xsltTree= new ActiveXObject("Msxml2.DOMDocument.5.0");
        xsltTree.async = false;
        // You can substitute other XSLT file names here.
        xsltTree.load("hello.xsl");

        resTree.innerHTML = srcTree.transformNode(xsltTree);
     }
  </SCRIPT>
</HEAD>

<BODY onload = "init()" >
   <div id="resTree"></div>
</BODY>

</HTML>
Note   MSXML 5.0 is used here, with the help of the version dependent ProgID of the DOM, Msxml2.DOMDocument.5.0. When you use this method to start the transformation, any XSLT style sheet that is already embedded in the source document is ignored. For more information about GUIDs and ProgIDs, see GUID and ProgID Information.

Try It!

  1. Copy the code above, and paste it into a text file. Save the file as hello.htm.
  2. Copy the XML source file, hello.xml, from the Hello, World! topic in the XSLT Starter Kit. Paste it into a text file, and save the file as hello.xml, in the same directory where you saved hello.htm.
  3. Copy the XSLT style sheet, hello.xsl, from Hello, World!. Paste it into a text file, and save the file as hello.xsl, in the same directory where you saved hello.htm and hello.xml.
  4. Double-click hello.htm. An Internet Explorer window should appear, containing the text "Hello, World! from an XSLT Programmer", formatted as specified in the XSLT style sheet.

Initiate XSLT from a Command Prompt

You can use the following JScript file to test XSLT samples quickly from a command prompt. This approach will work for transformations with any type of output.

xsltTest.js

var oArgs = WScript.Arguments;

if (oArgs.length == 0)
{
   WScript.Echo ("Usage : cscript xslt.js xml xsl");
   WScript.Quit();
}
xmlFile = oArgs(0) + ".xml";
xslFile = oArgs(1) + ".xsl";

var xsl = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.DOMDOCUMENT.5.0");
var xml = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.5.0");
xml.validateOnParse = false;
xml.async = false;
xml.load(xmlFile);

if (xml.parseError.errorCode != 0)
   WScript.Echo ("XML Parse Error : " + xml.parseError.reason);

xsl.async = false;
xsl.load(xslFile);

if (xsl.parseError.errorCode != 0)
   WScript.Echo ("XSL Parse Error : " + xsl.parseError.reason);

//WScript.Echo (xml.transformNode(xsl.documentElement));

try
{
   WScript.Echo (xml.transformNode(xsl.documentElement));
}
catch(err)
{
   WScript.Echo ("Transformation Error : " + err.number + "*" + err.description);
}

To test samples with xsltTest.js

  1. Copy the JScript code above, and paste it into a text file. Save the file as xsltTest.js in your system directory, such as c:\Windows. This allows you to invoke the script from any directory. If you save xsltTest.js to any other directory, you can either invoke it from that directory or invoke it using its absolute path.
  2. Copy the XML and XSLT files you want to test. Paste them into text files, and save them to a test directory, such as c:\test. Name the files as appropriate—for example, sampleXML.xml and sampleXSLT.xsl.
  3. Open a command prompt, and navigate to your test directory. Enter the following command: 
    xsltTest sampleXML sampleXSLT

    Notice the absence of file extensions on the arguments.

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