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Creating the XML objects in ASP

The first thing that ASP needs to do is create some server side objects which are capable of containing an XML document. The object type is "microsoft.xmldom" and is created with

set objXML=Server.CreateObject("microsoft.xmldom")

To construct my page, I need to create four XML objects.

• objMainXML - contains the details of every demo as held in example.xml
• objXML - contains the XML of the demo chosen
• objXSL - contains the XSL stylesheet to be applied
• objDefaultXSL - contains the default stylesheet that IE5 uses to display XML

The next step is to find out what demo is to be displayed and which XSL to use. This is controlled by the parameters passed in the Querystring.

The parameters are:

• id - contains the id number of the demo to be used
• xsl - contains the id of the xsl stylesheet to be used
• xml - flag to indicate whether or not to display the xml

e.g.

The URL http://www.TopXML.com/xsl/articles/scripting/examples.asp?id=2&xsl=1 will show the effects of the 1st stylesheet on the 2nd demo and show the code for the 1st stylesheet.

The URL http://www.TopXML.com/xsl/articles/scripting/examples.asp?id=2&xsl=2 will show the effects of the 2nd stylesheet on the 2nd demo and show the code for the 2nd stylesheet.

while the URL http://www.TopXML.com/xsl/articles/scripting/examples.asp?id=2&xsl=1&xml=1 will show the effects of the 1st stylesheet on the 2nd demo but will show the code for the XML instead.

The parameters are accessed by:

exampleID=Request.QueryString("id")
XSLid=Request.QueryString("xsl")

Now that we've found out which demo and XSL is to be used we can load the examples.xml file which contains the details of all of the demos.

'Set async=False to prevent the code from continuing before the xml is fully loaded
objMainXML.async=False
objMainXML.load(server.MapPath("examples.xml"))

The object objMainXML now contains the XML file as seen on the previous page

To find the demo that is being used we need to match up the exampleID given in the querystring with the id attribute given in the XML, which is contained in objMainXML

This sets objExamples to the root node of objMainXML
set objExamples=objMainXML.documentElement

This sets Demo to the example whose attribute id is equal to the variable exampleID
set Demo=objExamples.selectSingleNode("example[@id=" &exampleID &"]")

Demo now contains all the details of the chosen example. If id=2 then the Demo object would contain the XML as seen on the previous page.
The node <xmlFile> contains the name of the XML file to use.
To access this use:

XMLFile=demo.selectSingleNode("xmlFile").text

Now we need to create links for each XSL example and to display the explanation associated with the chosen example. First we need to create an object that contains all the XSL examples.

set XSLexamples =demo.selectSingleNode("XSLexample")

Note the difference between setting the variables XMLFile and XSLexamples.
XMLFile is a variable that contains the text of the node <xmlFile> while
XSLexamples is an XML object that contains the node <XSLexample> and all its children.

Now that we know what XSL stylesheet we're going to apply to which XML we can start to build some HTML as shown on page 3

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