I've used Oxygen's XSLT debugger a couple of times, but most of the time I don't use it. The main reason is that all of my builds involve multiple XSLT stylesheets tied together by ANT build files. Isolating the output of one step of the process and setting up all the parameters required to run any one of the scripts in Oxygen is usually more hassle than simply dropping in some <xsl:message> message statements to see what is going on. I write content in Oxygen but do most of my XSLT work in JEdit with the AntFarm plugin because it lets me launch any target I want with a click.
It's really worthwhile outputting the result of each transform at each point in the chain for debugging help, or at least mocking them.
I'd expect that most people will be running XSLT in some wider context and I have to think that it is usually going to be cumbersome to extract stylesheet and data from that context in order to feed it to the debugger. Is there, or could there be, some way to run my ANT builds within Oxygen and have the XSLT debugger track all the scripts that are being called and debug them?
Its always worth a little effort early on to allow you to see exactly the inputs and outputs from each step... makes life so much easier than messing around with xsl:message. Also, you might find using a "debug" primary stylesheet that imports your usual primary stylesheet and overrides the parameters with debug values is helpful, so you don't have to continually set them up in the IDE. -- Andrew Welch http://andrewjwelch.com Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/