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
40 libxml2 Tested with 2.6.17
41 libxslt Tested with 1.1.12
42
43 The example Web applications require WebStack (release 0.10 or later).
44
45 New in XSLTools 0.2 (Changes since XSLTools 0.1)
46 ------------------------------------------------
47
48 Added XMLTable.
49 Changed in-page requests to contain proper POST data.
50 Added Debian package support.
51 Added missing COPYING.txt file.
52
53 Notes on In-Page Update Functionality
54 -------------------------------------
55
56 Special note #1: Konqueror seems in certain cases to remember replaced form
57 content (when replaceChild is used to replace regions of the page which
58 include form elements). This causes the browser to believe that more form
59 fields exist on the page than actually do so, and subsequent form submissions
60 thus include the values of such removed fields. A special hack is in place to
61 disable form fields by changing their names, thus causing Konqueror to not
62 associate such fields with the real, active fields; this hack does not seem to
63 cause problems for Mozilla. This needs some investigation to determine in
64 exactly which circumstances the problem arises.
65
66 Special note #2: Konqueror also seems to crash if asked to find elements using
67 an empty 'id' attribute string. This needs some investigation to see if it
68 really is the getElementById call that causes the crash.
69
70 Various browsers (eg. Mozilla/Firefox, Konqueror) will not allow the
71 XMLHttpRequest in-page updates to function unless the URL used in the
72 requestUpdate JavaScript function is compatible with the URL at which the
73 browser finds the application. Currently, relative URLs are in use to avoid
74 this issue of compatibility, but should an absolute URL be deduced using the
75 WebStack API and then used, it may be possible that the values returned by
76 that API do not match the actual addresses entered into the address bar of the
77 browser.
78
79 To check the behaviour of the applications, it is possible to view the
80 document source of the pages served by applications and to verify that the
81 URLs mentioned in the JavaScript function calls (to 'requestUpdate') either be
82 a relative link or involve a URL similar to that which appears in the
83 browser's address bar. In some environments, the use of 'localhost' addresses
84 often confuses the browser and server; one workaround is to use real host
85 names or addresses instead of 'localhost'.
86
87 Choosing an element-path:
88
89 When specifying the "context" of the in-page update, one must imagine which
90 element the template fragment should operate within. If the template:id
91 attribute marks a particular section, then the element-path should be a path
92 to the applicable context element for that section in the complete template
93 document. Note that if a template:element attribute appears on the same
94 element as the template:id attribute then the element-path should refer to the
95 element specified in the template:element attribute.
96
97 Choosing where to put template:attribute, template:id and id:
98
99 When specifying the extent of a template fragment, one must be sure not to put
100 the template:id attribute on the same element as a template:attribute
101 annotation; otherwise, the generated code will be improperly extracted as a
102 fragment producing two versions of the element - one for when the specified
103 attribute is present, and one for when it is not present. Generally,
104 template:id and id can be placed on the same node, however.
105
106 Stable element ordering and element-path:
107
108 Within the element-path, the numbering of the elements will start at 1.
109 Therefore it is vital to choose a region of the form data structure with the
110 element-path which is isolated from surrounding elements whose positions would
111 otherwise be dependent on a stable ordering of elements, and whose processing
112 would be disrupted if some new elements suddenly appeared claiming the same
113 positions in the document. For example:
114
115 <item value=""> .../item$1/value
116 <type value=""/> .../item$1/type$1/value
117 <comment value=""/> .../item$1/comment$2/value
118 </item>
119
120 In-page update...
121
122 <comment value=""/> .../item$1/comment$1/value
123
124 Notes on XSL
125 ------------
126
127 libxslt seems to be quite liberal on the definition of runtime parameters, in
128 that there is no apparent need to explicitly declare the corresponding global
129 variables in stylesheets. Whilst this is nice, we may eventually need to
130 detect such variables and add them in the preparation process.
131
132 Release Procedures
133 ------------------
134
135 Update the XSLOutput.py and XSLForms/__init__.py __version__ attributes.
136 Change the version number and package filename/directory in the documentation.
137 Change code examples in the documentation if appropriate.
138 Update the release notes (see above).
139 Check the setup.py file and ensure that all package directories are mentioned.
140 Tag, export.
141 Generate the API documentation.
142 Remove generated .pyc files: rm `find . -name "*.pyc"`
143 Archive, upload.
144 Upload the introductory documentation.
145 Update PyPI, PythonInfo Wiki, Vaults of Parnassus entries.
146
147 Generating the API Documentation
148 --------------------------------
149
150 In order to prepare the API documentation, it is necessary to generate some
151 Web pages from the Python source code. For this, the epydoc application must
152 be available on your system. Then, inside the XSLTools directory, run the
153 apidocs.sh tool script as follows:
154
155 ./tools/apidocs.sh
156
157 Some warnings may be generated by the script, but the result should be a new
158 apidocs directory within the XSLTools directory.