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JSON to XML using XSLT

I met a requirement in which I need to get transfer JSON data into various XML document on the basis of XSLT.
In fact, same json data goes to different systems and they have their own object structure (properties nesting level etc) to store it.
I use XslCompiledTransform() in C# to transform Xml into Json; And now looking if there is any efficient way of transforming JSON into XML using XSLT ?

I don't think this will work. JSON is not XML based, so you can't apply XSLT transformations on it. XML to JSON would work, but not JSON to XML
Edit. I was wrong, check this: https://github.com/bramstein/xsltjson and this: How to convert json to xml using xslt

XSLT is to change one xml document to another xml document, however, json is not even a xml type document..
you can write a simple application to transfer the format

Setting aside the fact that XSLT is definitely not the right tool for that job, here's a pseudo approach to how I'd do it if I ever had to:
Create an extension function in C# that does the real job, i.e., getting a JSON string as an argument, returning a generic XPathNodeIterator XML chunk.
Process that result normally with XSLT to return the final custom converted format.
The XSLT would then look something like this (assuming XSLT 1.0 since you're in C#):
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:util="urn:JsonUtility.Converter"
>
<!-- Supplied from environment -->
<xsl:param name="json" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:variable name="xml" select="util:JSON2XML($json)" />
<!-- Start processing the returned XML -->
<xsl:apply-templates select="$xml/json" />
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="key">
<!-- output -->
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="array">
<!-- output -->
</xsl:template>
<!-- etc. -->
</xsl:stylesheet>
(Alternatively, if you create the final format in the C# extension, you could just do a <xsl:copy-of select="$xml" /> in the root template.)

xpath based on attribute and value

I need to process same xml, below is partial of it:
<response>
<dat id="1">
<b>
<i>1</i>
</b>
<ds>
<d>
<t>2012-12-21</t>
what xpath I need to use to select the element "d", which has a parent-parent element "dat" with attribute id="1" and has a child element "t" with value of 2012-12-21?
It is in C#, the application grabs this xml from internet and loads it into XmlDocument. Currently I am doing multiple steps: find note "dat", then find "t" under "dat", then go to parent node "d". I am hoping to have xpath to replace the above multiple steps.
I've tried this xpath: //dat[#id="1"]/ds/d[t="2012-12-21"], but return null node
Thanks.
EDIT:
See below for Dimitre Novatchev's solution.
btw: //dat[#id="1"]/ds/d[t="2012-12-21"] worked as well, not sure what happened when I did the test.

Use:
//dat[#id = 1]/*/d[t[. = '2012-12-21']]
This selects all d elements that have a t child, whose string value is the string '2012-12-21',
and whose grand-parent is a dat that has an id attribute with numeric value of 1.
In case you want to select just one (say the first) of all such elements, use:
(//dat[#id = 1]/*/d[t[. = '2012-12-21']])[1]
XSLT - based verification:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:copy-of select="//dat[#id = 1]/*/d[t[. = '2012-12-21']]"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
When this transformation is applied on the (finished) provided XML document:
<response>
<dat id="1">
<b>
<i>1</i>
</b>
<ds>
<d>
<t>2012-12-21</t>
</d>
</ds>
</dat>
</response>
the above XPath expression is evaluated and the result of this evaluation (the selected node(s) ) is copied to the output:
<d>
<t>2012-12-21</t>
</d>

Limiting the length of an inline element

How would you limit the length of a variable length text element which can contain text attributes (<b>, <i>, <sup>, ...) and links. The tags would need to be preserved both opening and closing, though an entire tag (both opening and close) could be removed if at appropriate position (cannot remove all tags to simplify the problem). I have c#, xslt, and css available to me. I would prefer not to do this with javascript.
For example:
On the <b>approximate realization</b> of continuous mappings by <i>neural networks</i> <a href='http://...very long link'>some text</a>...
Keep in mind that the tags themselves (and their attributes) should not count against the length.
Also, the text should wrap, so using width and overflow is out of the question.
Both Mrchief and Dimitre Novatchev have great solutions. I'm more fond of putting this logic in my xslt so I choose Dimitre Novatchev's as the answer, though both should be.

This XSLT 1.0 transformation:
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:key name="kTextById" match="text()" use="generate-id()"/>
<xsl:param name="pMaxLength" select="60"/>
<xsl:variable name="vTextToSplit">
<xsl:apply-templates select="(//text())[1]" mode="calc"/>
</xsl:variable>
<xsl:variable name="vsplitNode" select=
"key('kTextById', substring-before(substring-after($vTextToSplit,'|'), '|'))"/>
<xsl:variable name="vsplitLength" select=
"substring-before($vTextToSplit,'|')"/>
<xsl:variable name="vsplitPos" select=
"substring-after(substring-after($vTextToSplit,'|'),'|')"/>
<xsl:template match="node()|#*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|#*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="/">
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="not($vTextToSplit)">
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:apply-templates select="/node()"/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()" mode="calc">
<xsl:param name="paccumLength" select="0"/>
<xsl:variable name="vPos" select="count(preceding::text())+1"/>
<xsl:variable name="vnewAccumLength" select=
"$paccumLength+string-length()"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$vnewAccumLength >= $pMaxLength">
<xsl:value-of select=
"concat(string-length() - ($vnewAccumLength -$pMaxLength),
'|', generate-id(),
'|', $vPos
)"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:apply-templates mode="calc"
select="(//text())[position() = $vPos+1]">
<xsl:with-param name="paccumLength" select="$vnewAccumLength"/>
</xsl:apply-templates>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="text()">
<xsl:variable name="vPos" select="count(preceding::text())+1"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$vPos > $vsplitPos"/>
<xsl:when test="$vPos = $vsplitPos">
<xsl:value-of select="substring(.,1,$vsplitLength)"/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
when applied on the provided input (wrapped into a single top element to make it a well-formed XML document):
<t>On the <b>approximate realization</b> of continuous mappings by <i>neural networks</i> <a href='http://...very long link'>some text</a>...</t>
produces the wanted, correct result -- a well-formed XML document that contains the elements of the source XML document and the total length of whose text nodes is equal exactly to the specified length (60) in the global parameter $pMaxLength:
<t>On the <b>approximate realization</b> of continuous mappings by <i>neu</i>
</t>
Explanation:
The global variable $vTextToSplit is calculated. It is a string, containing three values that are pipe-separated: the length in the "split node" that must be dropped off, the generate-id() od the "split node" and the ordinal position of the "split node" among all text nodes, in document order. The "split node" is this text node that contains the last character of the total string of text nodes to be generated.
The "split node, its "generate-id() and its length-to-be-trimmed are extracted from `$vTextToSplit" into three coresponding global variables.
The template matching the root (/) of the document checks for the edge case when the total length of the text nodes is less than the specified wanted length. If so, the complete XML document is copied to the output. If not so, the processing continues by applying templates to its child nodes.
The identity rule copies all nodes "as-is".
The template matching any text node overrides the identity template. It processes the matched text node in one of three ways: if this text node has smaller position than the "split node" it is copied entirely. If the matched node has position greater that the "split node" then its string value isn't copied. Finally, if this is the split node itself, all characters of its string value with the exception of the trailing $vsplitLength characters are copied.
II. XSLT 2.0 solution:
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes"/>
<xsl:param name="pMaxLength" select="60"/>
<xsl:template match="node()|#*">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="node()|#*"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match=
"text()[not(sum((.|preceding::text())/string-length(.))
gt
$pMaxLength)
]">
<xsl:copy-of select="."/>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match=
"text()[sum(preceding::text()/string-length(.))
gt
$pMaxLength
]"/>
<xsl:template match=
"text()[sum((.|preceding::text())/string-length(.))
ge
$pMaxLength
and
not(sum(preceding::text()/string-length(.))
gt
$pMaxLength)
]">
<xsl:variable name="vprevLength" select=
"sum(preceding::text()/string-length(.))"/>
<xsl:variable name="vremainingLength" select=
"$pMaxLength - $vprevLength"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="substring(.,1,$vremainingLength)"/>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
when applied to the same source XML document (given above), the same correct result is produced:
<t>On the <b>approximate realization</b> of continuous mappings by <i>neu</i><a href="http://...very long link"/></t>
Note on performance: Both solutions presented will be slow for big XML documents. One way to avoid this is to use the scanl() function/template of FXSL. I will provide this third solution later, when I have more free time.

Here's an attempted solution:
public static string LimitText(string input, int width)
{
const string pattern = #"(</?[a-zA-Z0-9 '=://.]+>)";
var rgx = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.Compiled);
// remove tags and chop text to set width
var result = rgx.Replace(input, string.Empty).Substring(0, width);
// split till word boundary (so that "shittake" doesn't end up as "shit")
result = result.Substring(0, result.LastIndexOf(' '));
var matches = rgx.Matches(input);
// non LINQ version to keep things simple
foreach (Match match in matches)
{
var groups = match.Groups;
if (groups[0].Index > result.Length) break;
result = result.Insert(groups[0].Index, groups[0].Value);
}
// check for unbalanced tags
matches = rgx.Matches(result);
if (matches.Count % 2 != 0)
{
// chop off unbalanced tag
return result.Substring(0, matches[matches.Count-1].Groups[0].Index);
}
return result;
}
Caveats:
The regex matches all tags specifed in your post. You can expand upon it to include more characters based on your real scenario. However, parsing
HTML with Regex is always going to be tricky.
If your input string doesn't contain balanced tags (i.e. for each opening tag, there is a closing tag), this may not work as expected.
If you expect self closing tags (like <br />) or open input tags in your input string, then a pre-flight sanitization is needed. The idea is the same, get a group of matches, run through LimitText and re-insert these tags on the result string.
The final rendered text on browser may still not be satisfactory as font size or screen resolution may produce incorrect results. For this, you need to resort to JS based solution.
This should get you started and then you can expand upon it for any corner cases.

a sites design should never limit what information you can place within a container. you could set a max-height of the element and using css allow full height on hover - you'd have to use some positioning and possibly some negative margin to prevent other elements jumping about.
Alternatively you could make use of the text-overflow css property but this is not fully implemented yet (as far as I know)- strangely its supposedly supported in ie6> !
the regex solution is difficult - you need find the position of the end of text with tags stripped out, cut the remainder of the string with tags in and append any unclosed tags - a tricky one!

How determine the right xml to write out

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<idmef:IDMEF-Message version="1.0" xmlns:idmef="http://iana.org/idmef">
<idmef:Alert messageid="abc123456789">
<idmef:Analyzer analyzerid="bc-corr-01">
<idmef:Node category="dns">
<idmef:name>correlator01.example.com</idmef:name>
</idmef:Node>
</idmef:Analyzer>
<idmef:CreateTime ntpstamp="0xbc72423b.0x00000000">2000-03-09T15:31:07Z
</idmef:CreateTime>
<idmef:Source ident="a1">
<idmef:Node ident="a1-1">
<idmef:Address ident="a1-2" category="ipv4-addr">
<idmef:address>192.0.2.200</idmef:address>
</idmef:Address>
</idmef:Node>
</idmef:Source>
<idmef:Target ident="a2">
<idmef:Node ident="a2-1" category="dns">
<idmef:name>www.example.com</idmef:name>
<idmef:Address ident="a2-2" category="ipv4-addr">
<idmef:address>192.0.2.50</idmef:address>
</idmef:Address>
</idmef:Node>
<idmef:Service ident="a2-3">
<idmef:portlist>5
</idmef:portlist>
</idmef:Service>
</idmef:Target>
<idmef:Classification text="Login Authentication">
<idmef:Reference origin="vendor-specific">
<idmef:name>portscan</idmef:name>
<idmef:url>http://www.vendor.com/portscan</idmef:url>
</idmef:Reference>
</idmef:Classification>
<idmef:Assessment>
<idmef:Impact severity ="high" completion ="failed" type ="file" >
</idmef:Impact>
</idmef:Assessment>
</idmef:Alert>
</idmef:IDMEF-Message>
I'm working with a xml messaging system, where a message packet is read from a queue, and applied against a rule with a pattern in it. If the pattern matches, the rule fires and some elements, node etc of the xml are read and stored. The definition of what to be read from the message is defined using Xpath expression. For example, the following xpath takes the severity attribute and store it.
name.set(".//idmef:Classification/idmef:Assesment/idmef:Impact/#severity","high");
So, I would take that xpath, compile it, and read the serverity attribute and store for latter use.
When I go to create the new XML message using the stored value, there may be a case that the completion and type attribute are mandatory.
So question is, how do I check if those attributes need to be written out. I know that schema is involved somehow, but how do you do it. More to the point, if the user selects only the severity attribute, how would I go about, adding in the rest of the structure, like Classification, Message and other elements, when have additional xpath lookups, for example down at
Bob.

The commenters are correct - you need to first fix your XML to make it well formed.
However, If I understand your problem correctly, you need write out some XML, adding or changing some attributes.
If this is what you need I would try using an XSL transform to add the attributes.
Here is a modified version of the identity transform that should be close to what you need.
if you need some conditional logic then surround the attribute tags with xsl:if
<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions"
xmlns:idmef="http://iana.org/idmef" xpath-default-namespace="http://iana.org/idmef">
<xsl:output method="xml" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="#*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#*|node()"/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="Impact">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:copy-of select="#*"/>
<xsl:attribute name="severity">high</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="completion">failed</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="type">file</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:apply-templates/>
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

You could:
Open original XML (A)
Create a new XML document (B)
Run your xpath against (A)
Add matching results to (B)
Save (B)
This makes any sense?

I found an answer here on stackoverflow, and here it is. Create XML Nodes from XPath I know it is as far away from how I described it above, but at the time I was designing it, I
didn't have a scobie how it would work.

Transforming flat file to XML using XSLT-like technology

I'm designing a system which is receiving data from a number of partners in the form of CSV files. The files may differ in the number and ordering of columns. For the most part, I will want to choose a subset of the columns, maybe reorder them, and hand them off to a parser. I would obviously prefer to be able to transform the incoming data into some canonical format so as to make the parser as simple as possible.
Ideally, I would like to be able to generate a transformation for each incoming data format using some graphical tool and store the transformation as a document in a database or on disk. Upon receival of data, I would apply the correct transformation (never mind how I determine the correct transformation) to get an XML document in a canonical format. If the incoming files had contained XML I would just have created an XSLT document for each format and been on my way.
I've used BizTalk's Flat File XSLT Extensions (or whatever they are called) for something similar in the past, but I don't want the hassle of BizTalk (and I can't afford it either) on this project.
Does anyone know if there are alternative technologies and/or XSLT extensions which would enable me to achieve my goal in an elegant way?
I'm developing my app in C# on .NET 3.5 SP1 (thus would prefer technologies supported by .NET).

XSLT provides new features that make it easier to parse non-XML files.
Andrew Welch posted an XSLT 2.0 example that converts CSV into XML

I think you need something like this (sorry, not supported by .NET but code is very simple)
http://csv2xml.sourceforge.net

IIRC someone has created a "LINQ to CSV" library that might be a starting point to create the intermediate XML (in memory) as input into the transform.
Found it here.

You might try LINQ to CSV. There is one offering from Microsoft's Eric White and another from Matt Perdeck. Others are out there...

I have found 2 potential solutions when looking into a similar problem space.
Progress Software has a set of tools and API (.Net), which when used in conjuction with .conv (flat to XML converter) files created in their Stylus Studio tool allows for transformation of any pre-defined flat file format into XML at run time. More info here: http://www.datadirect.com/developer/data-integration/tutorials/converter-sample-code/index.ssp
In addition there is an XML format called XFLAT which allows for the description of flat files in a variety of formats, delimited, fixed width etc... There is a java program which will convert flat files, where you've provied the XFLAT description into XML so that you can continue with a standard XML to XML XSLT transformation. More details can be found here: http://www.unidex.com/overview.htm
I have never actually used either of these tools, but found them when researching a similar problem.

Check out this article on implementing an XmlReader that processes non-XML input. It's not a terrifically difficult task, and once you've got it working you don't need to use an XSLT-like technology, you can just use XSLT.

this will parse the output from the linux ip route list command. It's just what I had laying around.
you must wrap the output from the comman in an element called 'output' and the style sheet will take it from there. The real key here is the tokenize command in the xpath 2.0 spec. I don't know how you could do this before that. Also this doesn't make a single root element, as that was not what I needed it for. In your case, instead spliting on space, Id spli on a ','
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="#*|node()">
<xsl:copy>
<xsl:apply-templates select="#*|node()" />
</xsl:copy>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="//output">
<!-- split things up for each new line -->
<xsl:variable name="line" select="tokenize(.,'\n')"/>
<xsl:for-each select="$line">
<!-- split each line into peices based on space -->
<xsl:variable name="split" select="tokenize(.,' +')"/>
<xsl:if test="count($split) > 1">
<xsl:element name="route">
<xsl:for-each select="$split">
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="position() = 1">
<xsl:attribute name="address" select="."/>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise>
<xsl:variable name="index" select="position()"/>
<xsl:variable name="fieldName" select="."/>
<xsl:if test="$fieldName and position() mod 2 = 0">
<xsl:attribute name="{$fieldName}" select="$split[$index + 1]"/>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:element>
</xsl:if>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

You can also take a look at altova's MapForce