1 Introduction
2 ------------
3
4 XSLTools is a collection of modules and packages facilitating the development
5 of applications based on XML, XSL stylesheets and transformations, notably Web
6 applications involving complicated Web forms potentially consisting of
7 editable hierarchical structures and potentially involving "live" or "in-page"
8 dynamic updates to portions of those Web forms.
9
10 Quick Start
11 -----------
12
13 Try running the demo:
14
15 python tools/demo.py
16
17 An introductory guide to creating applications can be found in the docs
18 directory - see docs/index.html for the start page.
19
20 Contact, Copyright and Licence Information
21 ------------------------------------------
22
23 The current Web page for XSLTools at the time of release is:
24
25 http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/XSLTools.html
26
27 Copyright and licence information can be found in the docs directory - see
28 docs/COPYING.txt, docs/LICENCE.txt and docs/LICENCE-Sarissa.txt for more
29 information.
30
31 Dependencies
32 ------------
33
34 XSLTools has the following basic dependencies:
35
36 Package Release Information
37 ------- -------------------
38
39 libxml2dom 0.2.1
40 libxml2 Tested with 2.6.17
41 libxslt Tested with 1.1.12
42
43 The example Web applications require WebStack (release 1.0 or later).
44
45 New in XSLTools 0.2 (Changes since XSLTools 0.1)
46 ------------------------------------------------
47
48 Made a new XSLTools package and moved XSLOutput into it.
49 Added XMLCalendar and XMLTable (to the XSLTools package).
50 Changed in-page requests to contain proper POST data.
51 Added Debian package support.
52 Added missing COPYING.txt file.
53 Renamed the scripts to avoid naming issues in system-wide installations.
54 Added template:if to XSLForms.
55 Updated the code to work with WebStack 1.0 changes.
56
57 Notes on In-Page Update Functionality
58 -------------------------------------
59
60 Special note #1: Konqueror seems in certain cases to remember replaced form
61 content (when replaceChild is used to replace regions of the page which
62 include form elements). This causes the browser to believe that more form
63 fields exist on the page than actually do so, and subsequent form submissions
64 thus include the values of such removed fields. A special hack is in place to
65 disable form fields by changing their names, thus causing Konqueror to not
66 associate such fields with the real, active fields; this hack does not seem to
67 cause problems for Mozilla. This needs some investigation to determine in
68 exactly which circumstances the problem arises.
69
70 Special note #2: Konqueror also seems to crash if asked to find elements using
71 an empty 'id' attribute string. This needs some investigation to see if it
72 really is the getElementById call that causes the crash.
73
74 Special note #3: Konqueror's XMLHttpRequest seems to append null bytes to the
75 end of field values.
76
77 Various browsers (eg. Mozilla/Firefox, Konqueror) will not allow the
78 XMLHttpRequest in-page updates to function unless the URL used in the
79 requestUpdate JavaScript function is compatible with the URL at which the
80 browser finds the application. Currently, relative URLs are in use to avoid
81 this issue of compatibility, but should an absolute URL be deduced using the
82 WebStack API and then used, it may be possible that the values returned by
83 that API do not match the actual addresses entered into the address bar of the
84 browser.
85
86 To check the behaviour of the applications, it is possible to view the
87 document source of the pages served by applications and to verify that the
88 URLs mentioned in the JavaScript function calls (to 'requestUpdate') either be
89 a relative link or involve a URL similar to that which appears in the
90 browser's address bar. In some environments, the use of 'localhost' addresses
91 often confuses the browser and server; one workaround is to use real host
92 names or addresses instead of 'localhost'.
93
94 Choosing an element-path:
95
96 When specifying the "context" of the in-page update, one must imagine which
97 element the template fragment should operate within. If the template:id
98 attribute marks a particular section, then the element-path should be a path
99 to the applicable context element for that section in the complete template
100 document. Note that if a template:element attribute appears on the same
101 element as the template:id attribute then the element-path should refer to the
102 element specified in the template:element attribute.
103
104 Choosing where to put template:attribute, template:id and id:
105
106 When specifying the extent of a template fragment, one must be sure not to put
107 the template:id attribute on the same element as a template:attribute
108 annotation; otherwise, the generated code will be improperly extracted as a
109 fragment producing two versions of the element - one for when the specified
110 attribute is present, and one for when it is not present. Generally,
111 template:id and id can be placed on the same node, however.
112
113 Stable element ordering and element-path:
114
115 Within the element-path, the numbering of the elements will start at 1.
116 Therefore it is vital to choose a region of the form data structure with the
117 element-path which is isolated from surrounding elements whose positions would
118 otherwise be dependent on a stable ordering of elements, and whose processing
119 would be disrupted if some new elements suddenly appeared claiming the same
120 positions in the document. For example:
121
122 <item value=""> .../item$1/value
123 <type value=""/> .../item$1/type$1/value
124 <comment value=""/> .../item$1/comment$2/value
125 </item>
126
127 In-page update...
128
129 <comment value=""/> .../item$1/comment$1/value
130
131 Notes on XSL
132 ------------
133
134 libxslt seems to be quite liberal on the definition of runtime parameters, in
135 that there is no apparent need to explicitly declare the corresponding global
136 variables in stylesheets. Whilst this is nice, we may eventually need to
137 detect such variables and add them in the preparation process.
138
139 Release Procedures
140 ------------------
141
142 Update the XSLTools/__init__.py and XSLForms/__init__.py __version__
143 attributes.
144 Change the version number and package filename/directory in the documentation.
145 Change code examples in the documentation if appropriate.
146 Update the release notes (see above).
147 Check the setup.py file and ensure that all package directories are mentioned.
148 Check the release information in the PKG-INFO file and in the package
149 changelog (and other files).
150 Tag, export.
151 Generate the API documentation.
152 Remove generated .pyc files: rm `find . -name "*.pyc"`
153 Archive, upload.
154 Upload the introductory documentation.
155 Update PyPI, PythonInfo Wiki, Vaults of Parnassus entries.
156
157 Generating the API Documentation
158 --------------------------------
159
160 In order to prepare the API documentation, it is necessary to generate some
161 Web pages from the Python source code. For this, the epydoc application must
162 be available on your system. Then, inside the XSLTools directory, run the
163 apidocs.sh tool script as follows:
164
165 ./tools/apidocs.sh
166
167 Some warnings may be generated by the script, but the result should be a new
168 apidocs directory within the XSLTools directory.
