Operation Manual

495
USING DREAMWEAVER
Displaying XML data with XSLT
Last updated 3/28/2012
Link an XSLT page to an XML page
After you have an entire XSLT page with dynamic content placeholders for your XML data, you must insert a reference
to the XSLT page in the XML page.
Note: The XML and XSL files you use for client-side transformations must reside in the same directory. If they don’t, the
browser will read the XML file and find the XSLT page for the transformation, but will fail to find assets (style sheets,
images, and so on) defined by relative links in the XSLT page.
1 Open the XML file that you want to link to your XSLT page.
2 Select Commands > Attach an XSLT Stylesheet.
3 In the dialog box, click the Browse button, browse to the XSLT page you want to link to, select it, and click OK.
4 Click OK to close the dialog box and insert the reference to the XSLT page at the top of the XML document.
Missing character entities for XSLT
Specify a missing character entity
In XSLT, some characters are not allowed in certain contexts. For example, you cannot use the less than sign (<) and
the ampersand (&) in the text between tags or in an attribute value. The XSLT transformation engine will give you an
error if those characters are used incorrectly. To solve the problem, you can specify character entities to replace the
special characters.
A character entity is a string of characters that represents other characters. Character entities are either named or
numbered. A named entity begins with an ampersand (&) followed by the name or characters, and ends with a
semicolon (;). For example,
&lt; represents the left angle bracket character (<). Numbered entities also start and end
the same way, except that a hash sign (#) and a number specify the character.
XSLT has the following five predefined entities:
If you use other character entities in an XSL file, you need to define them in the DTD section of the XSL file.
Dreamweaver provides several default entity definitions that you can see at the top of an XSL file created in
Dreamweaver. These default entities cover a broad selection of the most commonly used characters.
When you preview your XSL file in a browser, Dreamweaver checks the XSL file for undefined entities and notifies you
if an undefined entity is found.
If you preview an XML file attached to an XSLT file or if you preview a server-side page with an XSLT transformation,
the server or browser (instead of Dreamweaver) notifies you of an undefined entity. The following is an example of a
message you may get in Internet Explorer when you request an XML file transformed by an XSL file with a missing
entity definition:
Character Entity Code
< (less-than) &lt;
& (ampersand) &amp;
> (greater-than) &gt;
" (quote) &quot;
‘ (apostrophe) &apos;