At 04:49 AM 12/3/2009, George wrote:

Dear Ingo,

Such an editor is on our todo list. However it is not scheduled for implementation yet and it requires a substantial implementation effort so it is a long term project.

Best Regards, George -- George Cristian Bina <oXygen/> XML Editor, Schema Editor and XSLT Editor/Debugger http://www.oxygenxml.com

Ingo Freitag wrote:

...

Hello,

Do you plan for a future release to add a graphical editor for creation of XML -> XML mappings with xslt? Currently I'm using MapForce, but I would like to use Oxygen, because the handling is much better (from my point of view).

This is unsolicited advice from a heavy XSLT user. I have seen attempts at doing this, which have mainly faltered. I think this happens, for the most part, due to the early design of such a tool being over-ambitious. Between the impossibility of accommodating all potential needs, and the fact that auto-generated code is (except in the very simplest cases) atrocious and hard to maintain, such tools have turned out to be more trouble than they are worth. The best approach to the goal, I think, is an incremental one. Start with a tool that does not presume to replace the need to hand edit XSLT, but rather aids the coder, especially in early stages. I can see the utility of a tool that would (a) poll an input data set and autogenerate templates matching every element type, or perhaps even some qualified elements and/or attributes, and then perhaps (b) provide a GUI interface to enhance these templates with simple mappings into a target tag set. But to go much further than that is going to require a great deal of testing and development with real coders using a wide variety of styles in a wide variety of application scenarios. It's somewhat analogous to natural language processing, I think: you just can't assume that real users will want (or even be able) to use the language in quite the way you expect. The general idea of a GUI (visual/iconic) rendition and manipulation of arbitrary XSLT stylesheets is a related one and potentially intriguing. This kind of tool would not be trusted with designing templates (although it might support macros to facilitate writing common code patterns). Instead, it would take the approach of providing a gui/drag-and-drop "toybox" interface to the creation and maintenance of XSLT. (oXygen already supports some rudimentary features of this type, for example in its XSLT/XQuery input window, where you can drag an icon representing an element in the nominal source data file and oXygen makes a template for you.) My guess is that this kind of thing could be useful as a teaching tool and perhaps for simple push stylesheets, but for heavy-duty industrial-grade work, the pros will still work with the raw syntax. (As with most languages, once you reach a certain facility with XSLT, the syntax mostly disappears.) A comparable idea is that of offering a simplified, concise syntax for XSLT. Such syntaxes have been proposed and even developed more than once, but have never caught on. There's a lesson in that, I think. Cheers, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@mulberrytech.com Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ======================================================================