I've been tasked with converting some text log files from a test reporting tool that I've inherited. The tool is a compiled C# (.NET 3.5) application.
I want to parse and convert a group of logically connected log files to a single XML report file, which is not a problem. The System.Xml classes are easy enough to use.
However, I also want to create a more "readable" file to accompany each report. I've chosen HTML, and because I like standardization, I'd prefer to do it in proper XHTML.
My question is how should I go about creating the HTML files along with the XML reports? My initial thought is to build the XML file, then to use LINQ and a simple StreamWriter to build an HTML file within my C# code. I could also use XSLT as opposed to LINQ to make the C# code easier. But since I have to compile this anyway, I don't like the idea of adding more files to the installation/distribution.
Is using LINQ going to cause me any problems as opposed to XSLT? Are there any nice HTML writing libraries for .NET that conform to XHTML? Since I have everything parsed from the log files in working memory, is there an easy way to create both files at the same time easily?
I'd create an xslt transform and just run that against the XML. Linq really isn't designed to transform XML of one schema (e.g., your report) to another (e.g., xhtml). You could brute force it, but xslt is an elegant way to do it.
I would actually recommend using XSL transform. Since you already have the XML doc. If you write a good XSL transform you will get very good results.
http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/xsl_transformation.asp
small snippet:
XslCompiledTransform xsl = new XslCompiledTransform();
xsl.Load(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(xslPath));
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
using (TextWriter tw = new StringWriter(sb))
{
// Where the magic happens
xsl.Transform(xmlDoc, null, tw);
//return of text which you could save to file...
return sb.ToString();
}
One nice thing with using the XSLT is that you can put a processing instruction at the top of the XML that tells the user's browser how to generate the report itself:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="Your_XSLT.xslt"?>
That way you don't have to have a separate step to generate the report. The user just opens the XML file directly in the browser, but they see the generated report instead.
Related
I am writing a parser to parse incoming text files. I have it to where it will parse everything accurately.
I have an option for it to output to text - this was done to check the accuracy of the parsing. I am currently implementing an option to write to a spreadsheet but it doesn't output everything yet.
I have a request to output as static HTML. Is it worth outputting to XML and then generating HTML from that?
I see C# has the XMLTransform class which looks like it would do what I need. Is using the XML designer in VS and writing the XSLT file easier than hand-coding all of the HTML output? I know Excel will import XML files, but it is a little messy and I don't get the formatting options I can get if I generate the .xls file directly
I would give you a qualified No.
It is generally not worth building XML then running it through an XSLT transformation to build HTML.
That said, I might consider such an option if I wanted to easily swap out transformations, such as if this is an app used by multiple clients and the generated HTML would be client dependent. Even then I'd investigate using a simple tokenized HTML template in which I just plugged in the data I wanted. However, if the transformation was sufficiently complex then, yes, I'd go the XSLT route.
The reason for the No is that by the conversion adds such a level of complexity that it is usually not worth the time involved.
I'm working on a C# application that is going to save a DataSet to an Excel file.
I have found several examples of how to do this, but they all require you to have an xslt style sheet. I already have an existing Excel spreadsheet with all the worksheets and columns created. Is there an easy way to create an .xslt file from my existing Excel spreadsheet?
An example.
First of all, your question is really confusing and hard to understand. You might want to rewrite it to be a bit more specific. If you really have two or three questions, then ask each one on a separate page.
Step 1. You said that you have an Excel file. Open it up in a text editor and look at it. If it is in XML format, then the XSL that you need should be obvious because your job is to convert the existing XML dataset into the Excel XML format.
Step 2. XSL Templates are not magic. They are actually a form of programming language that is executed by an XLST engine. Of course it is possible to write a program that can compare two XML formats and generate an XSL template that would transform one into another, but that would be a very complex program and it would probably have some rigid requirements on the type of XML files that it would work with. I doubt that anyone has created such a tool that you can leverage.
Step 3. Get a decent tool that allows you to apply an XSL template to your dataset so that you can test it without a lot of work. Personally I use Netbeans with an XML Debug plugin, but there are numerous other tools out there. In fact, you could just write a simple transform tool yourself that just runs the XSLT on a sample dataset and then opens it up in both Excel and a text editor.
How to upload XML file and generate Html file without XSLT file using C#...
LINQ to XML is one option. See also: Generating HTML using LINQ
The question is a little open-ended, but you might consider just writing a program that:
Deserializes the XML.
Having read in the XML, format the text.
Output the text using the standard in/out libraries in C#.
I don't know if this is the most efficient solution -- but I think it would work.
I'm beginning to work on a project which has some extensive XML XSLT processing to render output HTML.
Some changes need to be made to the XSLT and I need some tool that can help me modify it without having to run the solution every time. Something that can help me visualize the changes I'm making to the rendered HTML.
I've found StylusStudio but I preferably would want a freeware that I could use
It's not freeware, but Altova XMLSPY is pretty powerful XML IDE. It offers an XSLT debugger where you can step through your conversion, as well as generate output(HTML in your case) from a sample XML document with the XSLT document you are working on.
I have a requirement to hand-code an text file from data residing in a SQL table. Just wondering if there are any best practices here. Should I write it as an XMLDocument first and transform using XSL or just use Streamwriter and skip transformation altogether? The generated text file will be in EDIFACT format, so layout is very specific.
The normal thing to do is just write the EDIFACT data directly.
Creating it as an XMLDocument and transforming it to EDIFACT might be useful if there's a library already available to do the transformation. I say this because there's a lot of language support for XML output.
I can't see how XSL will help you here, but I've never had to output EDIFACT data.
http://www.stylusstudio.com/edi/XML_to_EDIFACT.html
This URL has an example XSLT for translating XML to EDIFACT which might solve your problem.