Re: extending xsl with javascript

Hi Scott & Charles - Thank you!

Scott - I suspect you are right that I won't be able to acess the window object during the time of XSL processing. My kludge has been to use HTTPRequest to load the xml document, create/set attributes that act as command line parameters, perfom the transformation, and then attach the result to a <div>. The top level XSL looks like:

<xsl:template match="/">
  <!-- Get Input Variables   -->
  <xsl:variable name="DashboardMode"><xsl:value-of select="//*/@templateMode"/></xsl:variable>
  <xsl:variable name="SelectedManager"><xsl:value-of select="//*/@selectedManager"/></xsl:variable> 
  <xsl:variable name="SelectedService"><xsl:value-of select="//*/@selectedService"/></xsl:variable> 
  <xsl:variable name="SelectedFunction"><xsl:value-of select="//*/@selectedFunction"/></xsl:variable> 

<!-- Top Level 'Select Case'  -->
<xsl:choose> 
 <!-- Service Manager Dashboard -->
 <xsl:when test="$DashboardMode='Manager'">
   <xsl:call-template name="ManagerDashboard" >
    <xsl:with-param name="manager"><xsl:value-of select="$SelectedManager"/></xsl:with-param>
    <xsl:with-param name="function"><xsl:value-of select="$SelectedFunction"/></xsl:with-param> 
   </xsl:call-template>
 </xsl:when>
 <!-- Service Dashboard -->
 <xsl:when test="$DashboardMode='Service'">
   <xsl:call-template name="ServiceDashboard" >
     <xsl:with-param name="service"><xsl:value-of select="$SelectedService"/></xsl:with-param>
     <xsl:with-param name="function"><xsl:value-of select="$SelectedFunction"/></xsl:with-param> 
   </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:when> 

  <xsl:otherwise>
    <xsl:apply-templates mode="Error" select="/"/> 
  </xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>

</xsl:template>


It's pretty ugly (and needs to be refactored), but it works! The challange to this app was to keep the depolyment simple (i.e., minimize the number of files, this has a minimum of three: html, xml, and xsl) and reasonably self contained. My customer develops a niche industry application and installation of xml processing engines would have been frowned upon. Thanks all for your help.

Regards,
April