XSLT Redundancy Problem

Question

Hi all,
I have a serious problem with redundancy in XSLT. In my conversion XML input file, I have many tags like that:
<tag1 name="..." date1a="..." date1b="...">
</tag1>
<tag2 name="..." date2="..." date2b="...">
</tag2>
All with different tag names and different attribute names (although the attributes hold similar information).
Now what I need is a template that could be applied to a combination of tag-attribute, e.g. to tag1, using the values of date1a.
My current solution has a template for each combination - which is very redundant.
Any idea how to optimize this without changing the input file? I thought of global variables to store the attribute value but they are "final", so that does not work. Local variables seem to be limited to a single template, so they cannot be used either.
Any help will be appreciated,
Ralf

Answer 1

Hi,
This is a typical line from the input file:
<WebAppM3.SingleInfo xmi.id="a71" xmi.uuid="7e33f8b02e0f30f5:00a981ca:000000f425774313:8181" Name="StaticPage" Entity="a67 a66" SubView="a72 a73">
</WebAppM3.SingleInfo>
This is a typical transformation rule for it (the relevant rules are for Entity and SubView:
<xsl:template match="WebAppM3.SingleInfo">
<!-- Each instance of SingleInfo gets its own class using as much of its old values as
possible-->
<Model.Class annotation="" isRoot="false" isLeaf="true" isAbstract="false"
visibility="public_vis" isSingleton="false">
<xsl:copy-of select="@xmi.id"/>
<xsl:copy-of select="xmi.uuid"/>
<xsl:attribute name="name">
<xsl:value-of select="@Name"/>
</xsl:attribute>
<Model.Namespace.contents>
<xsl:apply-templates select="descendant::WebAppM3.M2Attribute"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select="attribute::Entity" mode="link"/>
<xsl:apply-templates select="attribute::SubView" mode="link"/>
</Model.Namespace.contents>
</Model.Class>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@Entity" mode="link">
<!-- References to the new Associations of type DBConnection -->
<xsl:variable name="data" select="stringhelp:tokenize(.)"/>
<xsl:variable name="anc_id" select="ancestor::WebAppM3.SingleInfo/@xmi.id"/>
<xsl:variable name="targets" select="../WebAppM3.DataSet"/>
<xsl:for-each select="$data/token">
<Model.Reference annotation="" scope="instance_level"
visibility="public_vis" type="a23" isChangeable="true">
<xsl:attribute name="name">Entity_<xsl:value-of select="."/></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="xmi.id">
<xsl:value-of select="$anc_id"/>_<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="xmi.uuid">
<xsl:value-of select="$anc_id"/>_<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="referencedEnd">
TEST
</xsl:attribute>
<Model.StructuralFeature.multiplicity>
<Model.MultiplicityType lower="0" upper="-1" is_ordered="false" is_unique="false" />
</Model.StructuralFeature.multiplicity>
</Model.Reference>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@SubView" mode="link">
<!-- References to the new Associations of type DBConnection -->
<xsl:variable name="data" select="stringhelp:tokenize(.)"/>
<xsl:variable name="anc_id" select="ancestor::WebAppM3.SingleInfo/@xmi.id"/>
<xsl:variable name="targets" select="../WebAppM3.DataSet"/>
<xsl:for-each select="$data/token">
<Model.Reference annotation="" scope="instance_level"
visibility="public_vis" type="a23" isChangeable="true">
<xsl:attribute name="name">Entity_<xsl:value-of select="."/></xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="xmi.id">
<xsl:value-of select="$anc_id"/>_<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="xmi.uuid">
<xsl:value-of select="$anc_id"/>_<xsl:value-of select="."/>
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="referencedEnd">
TEST
</xsl:attribute>
<Model.StructuralFeature.multiplicity>
<Model.MultiplicityType lower="0" upper="-1" is_ordered="false" is_unique="false" />
</Model.StructuralFeature.multiplicity>
</Model.Reference>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>
Cheers,
Ralf