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Stylus Studio®5 Release Notes
This release note contain the following sections:
New Features in Studio 5.0
Stylus Studio® Release 5.0 has several new features that increase both its ease of use and its versatility.
- XQuery Tools Enhancements: In Release 5.0, you can use Stylus Studio®'s unique mapper technology to create XML-to-XML mappings using XQuery. The mapper's intuitive drag-and-drop interface lets you easily define relationships of multiple source document elements to their target document counterparts. XQuery editing and processing has also been enhanced in this release, including support for the May 2003 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) XQuery specifications.
Finally, backmapping support, already available for XSLT, has been added to XQuery, allowing you to backmap from a result to the line of XQuery that generated it. An XQuery demonstration has been published to our website.
- Web Service Call Composer: You can use Stylus Studio® to compose and test SOAP requests without writing any code. With this feature, you can re-use the SOAP response as an XML document anywhere inside Stylus Studio®. The UDDI Browser allows you to browse UDDI registries for published Web services.
A Web Service Call Composer video demonstration is available.
- Profiler for XSLT and XQuery
- Stylus Studio® provides Profilers for XSLT and XQuery. When enabled, the Profiler generates a report that includes processing statistics and other performance information that allows you to assess how efficiently your XSLT and XQuery code is being processed. Stylus Studio®'s powerful backmapping functionality enables you to backmap from a report result to the specific line of code that generated it.
A Video demonstration of our XSLT and XQuery Profiler is available online.
- OASIS Catalog Support: Stylus Studio® includes numerous enhancements to catalog support — many updated
OASIS catalogs are now bundled with Stylus Studio®, a repository of other OASIS catalogs is available on the Stylus Studio® web site,
a new document wizard allows you to create custom catalogs, based on catalogs from the OASIS repository and others, and
another new document wizard allows you to convert a catalog in text file format to XML format. A Video demonstration of our new
OASIS catalog support has been posted to the website.
- Custom Document Wizard: Stylus Studio® provides several document wizards. Now you can write and/or register your own custom document wizards for use within Stylus Studio®. One of Release 5.0's new document wizards, DTD to XML Schema (Trang), was written using this feature and can serve as a template for developing other custom document wizards.
- Custom XML Schema Validators: Stylus Studio® provides several popular XML Schema validation engines (such as Microsoft's MSXML, .Net Parser, and Apache's XercesJ). In Release 5.0, you can configure Stylus Studio® to use any of these validation engines, or any others that you register.
- Custom File Systems: Stylus Studio® Release 5.0 allows you to write and register your own Custom File System. By implementing two simple Java interfaces, you can expose your custom or virtual repository through the Stylus Studio® file system.
Known Issues with This Release
Stylus Studio® Release 5.0 limitations are described in the following topics:
XQuery Limitations
XQuery support in Stylus Studio® Release 5.0 has the following limitations:
- Supported functions are based on the November 2002 W3C draft specification.
- "document-node(element(...))" is not considered a valid query.
- SequenceTypes can only be defined using global types/elements/attributes.
- There is no static typing.
- The "treat as" keyword will always fail.
Built-In XSLT Processor Limitations
The limitations listed in this section do not apply to the Saxon, XalanJ, and MSXML .NET XSLT processors. These processors are fully supported for processing and debugging in this release.
The Stylus Studio® built-in XSLT processor supports the W3C XSLT Recommendation except for the following features:
- xsl:apply-imports instruction.
- xsl:number localization features.
- Some xsl:output attributes. The following xsl:output attributes have no effect: version, standalone, cdata-section-elements, media-type. The following xsl:output attributes are supported: method, indent, encoding, doctype-public, and doctype-system.
- xsl:preserve-space instruction.
- xsl:strip-space instruction. While Stylus Studio® does not support the xsl:strip-space instruction, Stylus Studio® automatically strips text nodes that contain only white space.
- Simplified stylesheet syntax described in the XSLT Recommendation, Section 2.3. (The simplified syntax is not needed when you are using Stylus Studio® to edit a stylesheet.)
- xsl:sort attributes lang and case-order.
- Extension element mechanism described in the XSLT Recommendation, Section 14. (Stylus Studio® does support the extension function mechanism.)
Use of the format-number() function requires a JVM that is installed on your system and accessible by Stylus Studio®.
XPath 1.0 Processor Limitations
The Stylus Studio® XPath processor implementation includes a behavior that deviates from the XPath 1.0 recommendation. This behavior, however, is consistent with the DOM data model.
- Adjacent text and/or CDATA nodes are not merged.
- The DOM data model allows sequences of text nodes. The XPath data model does not. If a sequence of text nodes appears in an XML document, the XPath recommendation specifies that an XPath processor should process them as one text node.
- The Stylus Studio® XPath processor returns consecutive text nodes as multiple, distinct text nodes.
XML Mapper Limitations
Data types in the source and destination schemas are ignored.
MSXML Compatibility
The Stylus Studio® XSLT processor supports the use of extension functions in stylesheets. Other than this feature, the Stylus Studio® XSLT processor and the Microsoft Internet Explorer XSLT processor are compatible. If you want to use your stylesheet with the Microsoft MSXML XSLT processor, do not specify extension functions in your stylesheet.
Miscellaneous
- When Stylus Studio® processes a stylesheet that declares a CDATA section as the value of a variable, Stylus Studio® converts the CDATA section to text.
- When Stylus Studio® reads an XML or XSL file that contains all English characters, it defaults to a font that cannot display Japanese. If you add Japanese characters and then save, close, and reopen the document, Stylus Studio® uses a font that can display the Japanese characters.
- Javadoc for the custom file system API is unavailable at this time.
Known Problems
Stylus Studio® Release 5.0 includes these known problems:
- When Stylus Studio® processes a stylesheet that declares a CDATA section as the value of a variable, Stylus Studio® converts the CDATA section to text.
- When Stylus Studio® reads an XML or XSL file that contains all English characters, it defaults to a font that cannot display Japanese. If you add Japanese characters and then save, close, and reopen the document, Stylus Studio® uses a font that can display the Japanese characters.
Third-Party Code
This release includes the following third-party software:
- XSLT software developed by the Apache Software Foundation
- Xerces C++, an XML Parser also from Apache
- FOP, also from Apache
- Dave Raggett's HTML Tidy
- IBM's International Components for Unicode
- Trang Schema converter from Thai Open Source Software Center, Ltd.
- XML Schema Validator (XSV), developed at the Language Technology Group of the Human Communication Research Centre in the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, with support from the World Wide Web Consortium.
- DTDs and XML Schemas developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University).
The Sonic Stylus Studio® Developer's Network (SSDN)
provides technical forums, FAQs, and code samples for registered Stylus Studio® users. You can use
SSDN to ask questions, report problems, and share usage tips with Stylus Studio® developers and other Stylus Studio® users.
New Feature Automates Reporting
In the event that a critical application error occurs in Stylus Studio®, you can take advantage of a new feature that automatically
- Composes an e-mail
- Attaches a log
- Provides the opportunity to add additional comments and any supporting files you desire
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