XSLT Basic tags tutorials

1 <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform> The root element that declares the document to be an XSL style sheet is <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform>. Note: <xsl:stylesheet> and <xsl:transform> are completely synonymous and either can be used! The correct way to declare an XSL style sheet according to the W3C XSLT Recommendation is:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
...
</xsl:stylesheet>

or

<xsl:transform version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
...
</xsl:transform >

The xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" points to the official W3C XSLT namespace. If you use this namespace, you must also include the attribute version="1.0". 2 The <xsl:template> Element The <xsl:template> element is used to build templates. The match attribute is used to associate a template with an XML element. The match attribute can also be used to define a template for the entire XML document. The value of the match attribute is an XPath expression (i.e. match="/" defines the whole document).

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
   
   <xsl:template match="/">
      ...
  </xsl:template>   

</xsl:stylesheet>

The <xsl:template> element defines a template. The match="/" attribute associates the template with the root of the XML source document. 3 The <xsl:value-of> Element The <xsl:value-of> element can be used to extract the value of an XML element and add it to the output stream of the transformation:

<xsl:value-of select="XPath" />

Note: The select attribute, in the example above, contains an XPath expression. An XPath expression works like navigating a file system; a forward slash (/) selects subdirectories.