Re: [Gnue-dev] GNUe Reports and xmlns, oh my!

[Peter Sullivan]

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002 21:54:03 Jason Cater wrote:

[lots of stuff that's far too intersting to snip down logically]

>      I'm not suggesting that we pursue the "formatting engine", but
>      just suggesting that the possibility would always be there
>      without much recoding. Of course, I never said that I won't
>      officially suggest this later on. :)
> 
> So, unless someone gives me a compelling reason otherwise, this is the
> approach I want to take.

Hi Jason. Believe or not, I was actually thinking about this on the bus 
home 
from work last night. (I'm not normally the sort of person who tries to 
design 
XML schemas in his head for fun, honest, I'd just had that kind of 
day...) 
I'll give this some more detailed thought today, and post to the list 
hopefully tonight.

However, the key concept I was grappling with, which might help with the 
issues
you raise above, is that we might actually want *two* XML streams. The 
first 
one, similar to the existing <section> <field> tags, would be a straight 

listing of the data returned by the query. The second would be a "layout 

definition" which says how the data is to be displayed. The advantedge 
of this 
approach is that you can abstract (and re-use) the formatting with 
multiple 
sets of data easily.

Main problem is that I'm not sure is xslt is powerful enough to use a 
DTD 
to transform one XML document (the data) using infomation from another 
(the 
format) by reference to a third (the actual DTD). But seperating this 
into 
two seperate transforms might help with the sorts of technical issues 
you 
referred to above.

-- 
Peter Sullivan <address@hidden>