XSLT Editor - requirements

[dado0583]

Hi,
I'm currently writing an XSLT Editor tool as part of a university
project. I would like to know what those of you that use XSLT look for
in an XSLT editor.

Currently, the main features will be:
- Load a DTD or schema, which is shown in a tree format, so that
users can drag and drop desired XPaths into the .xsl text window.
- Drag and drop xslt keywords into the text editor window. So for
value-of, the following would be inserted. <xsl:value-of select=""/>.
Then the user can drag and drop the XPath into that tag.
Then theres all the old favourites: colour coded tags automatic
tag completion (depending on my programming skills), project files to
organise work and an output viewer.

Is there anything specifically related to XSLT, that anyone has found
would be useful in an XSLT editor.

Cheers,
David

PS. this project will be freely availible (with source code) once I've
'finished' it.

 

[Peter Flynn]

Hi,
I'm currently writing an XSLT Editor tool as part of a university
project. I would like to know what those of you that use XSLT look for
in an XSLT editor.

Currently, the main features will be:
- Load a DTD or schema, which is shown in a tree format, so that
users can drag and drop desired XPaths into the .xsl text window.
- Drag and drop xslt keywords into the text editor window. So for
value-of, the following would be inserted. <xsl:value-of select=""/>.
Then the user can drag and drop the XPath into that tag.
Then theres all the old favourites: colour coded tags automatic
tag completion (depending on my programming skills), project files to
organise work and an output viewer.

Emacs xsl-ide mode already has about 90% of this, without the drag-and-drop.
For speed, you might consider taking that as your basis, and adding the
D'n'D features to it.

Much more interesting would be a purely graphical constructor, which would
allow the user to define areas in a typographic window and specify the
source and manipulation of the information which was to go into them. Have
a look at the paper on VXT from the 2001 ACM DocEng Symposium
http://www.pms.ifi.lmu.de/publikati...:A Visual Approach to XML Transformations.pdf

Is there anything specifically related to XSLT, that anyone has found
would be useful in an XSLT editor.

XSLT2 answered most of my requirements. The only others are personal gripes
about a few small things I think should have been done differently.

PS. this project will be freely availible (with source code) once I've
'finished' it.

Excellent. Can I enter a plea that it should be cross-platform?

///Peter

 

[dado0583]

Hey, yeah the finished product will be written in Java so it will be
cross-platform.Cheers for the input.
Dave