Tip: Create Multiple Files in XSLT 2.0

For any reasonably complex data set, you need multiple views to navigate it. Take a QA test system, for example: With a pool of tests and test results, you need to see the data by date, by test category, by individual test, and so on. Each view would be in its own HTML file. So, can you have a single template in XSLT 2.0 build multiple HTML files from the one input data set?

The first version of XSLT was very strict. It had one input and one output (although you could have more than one template file). Version 2 of the standard still restricts you to one input, but the output system is more flexible. Now, you can have multiple output files using the xsl:result-document directive. This new tag has two key attributes, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1. xsl:result-document attributes

To test this directive, I have one input XML file that includes a set of test results (see Listing 1).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<tests>

    <testrun run="test1">

        <test name="foo" pass="true" />

        <test name="bar" pass="true" />

        <test name="baz" pass="true" />

    </testrun>

    <testrun run="test2">

        <test name="foo" pass="true" />

        <test name="bar" pass="false" />

        <test name="baz" pass="false" />

    </testrun>

    <testrun run="test3">

        <test name="foo" pass="false" />

        <test name="bar" pass="true" />

        <test name="baz" pass="false" />

    </testrun>

</tests>

This is pretty simple stuff. Within each test run is a set of named tests with the pass flag, which tells you whether the test was successful.

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