1 Segments I don’t expect to present any of these but will make them available for students. I will cite this resource during a lecture. They will need them for their 3rd and 4th projects.

2 Jim Fawcett Software Modeling Copyright © 1999-2017XML, XPath, and XSLT Jim Fawcett Software Modeling Copyright ©

3 Topics XML is an acronym for eXtensible Markup Language.Its purpose is to describe structured data. XPath is a language for navigating through an XML document. It’s used to select specific pieces of information from the document. XSLT is a language for transforming XML into something else. Often used to generate HTML or another XML document.

4 Introduction to XML XML is a tagged markup language designed to describe data: LectureNote.xml XML has only a couple of predefined tags. All the rest are defined by the document designer. XML can be used to create languages. XML is commonly used to: Define data structures Define messages Create web pages

5 Validation To be correct XML a set of markup needs only to be well formed; see Well-Formed XML. To determine if an XML document belongs to some document type, XML uses either: Document Type Definition (DTD) XML Schema XML that satisfies a Schema or DTD is said to be valid. DTDs and Schemas define allowable tags, attributes, and value types, and may also specify where these may occur in the document structure. XML schemas are written in XML; DTDs are not.

6 XML Element Elements are building blocks for XML documents.Element sytax: Elements are composed of tags, attributes, and a body: body example: Programming .Net All parts of the element are Unicode text. Body may contain both plain text and markup, e.g., lower-level elements. Tags and attributes are case sensitive and user defined.

7 Element Naming Rules XML names are composed of Unicode characters.Tag names must begin with a letter or underscore. Other tag name characters may contain characters, underscores, digits, hyphens, and periods. Names may contain neither spaces nor start with the string “xml” or any case variant of “xml”. Attribute names follow the same rules as tag names and are also required to be unique within the tag in which they are embedded.

8 Element Body Rules Element bodies may contain plain text or markup or both. By plain text, we mean character strings with no markup. Markup is text with embedded markup characters: & < > ‘ and “ Elements may also contain CDATA sections, designed to support text including large sections of markup characters but not interpreted as markup: These cannot be used to carry binary data.

9 Illegal Characters Certain characters are reserved for markup and are illegal in names and payload text: < < less than > > greater than & & ampersand  ' ‘ apostrophe " “ quotation mark We represent them in plain text with the escape sequences shown on the left, e.g.: < if we want a “less than” character in payload text.

10 XML Structure An XML document is defined by a standard opening processing instruction: Processing instructions and comments are the only XML tags that are not closed (see next page) The XML body starts with a single root element. An element is text of the form: payload text where the payload may be one or more child elements or simply text or both. Comments take the form:

11 Well-Formed XML XML has a few rules: There may be only a single root.All tags, except for processing instructions, must be closed: … Attribute values must be quoted. XML tags are case sensitive. All markup and payload is text with one exception: An element may define a CDATA section. CDATA is not parsed, and so may contain anything except the CDATA terminator.

12 CDATA A CDATA section has the syntax: CDATA is not parsed except to look for the terminator “]]>” so it may containing anything. It is not a good idea to try to store binary data in a CDATA section because the “]]>” sequence could appear as part of the binary data.

13 XML Documents An XML document is well-formed XML if it contains:A prolog: An optional link to an XSLT stylesheet An optional reference to a DTD or schema, used for validation Optional processing instructions Optional comments A body with a single root, which may contain any number of text sections, elements, and comments An optional epilogue consisting of comments and processing instructions

14 Processing InstructionsProcessing instructions are used to capture information for XML parsers and proprietary applications. Syntax: The most common processing instructions are: Document banner: XSLT style-sheet reference: Other hypothetical instructions:

15 Namespaces Namespaces are declared with special attributes and prefixes: body The uri should be unique, so current style is to use a url, e.g., These urls need not be bound to some real site. Attributes do not inherit the namespace of their element, so you need to do this: body Namespaces are used to distinguish different elements that happen to have the same tag name but are not intended to mean the same thing. Perhaps, they have different structures.

16 Example Jeff Prosise Microsoft Press 2002 608 Description of PCDATA LectureNote.xml Webmonkey | Reference: Special Characters Note: We can have both text and child nodes in the payload of an element.

17 XML Node Structure

18 XML Parse Tree

19 XML Presentation There are several ways XML data can be presented to a user: XML data island in an HTML page, interpreted by script XML file interpreted by script in an HTML page XML island or file bound to an HTML table XML file bound to a GridView control XML styled with an XSL style sheet Essentially, the XSL sheet creates viewable HTML Read, interpreted, and modified by an application The .Net System.XML library provides very effective support for this.

20 Introduction to XPath XPath provides a navigation facility within XML documents XPath is used to extract specific information from XML documents: In XSL style sheets In C# programs that use the XML DOM XmlNode.SelectSingleNode(xpath expression) XmlNode.SelectNodes(xpath expression) In Javascript code

21 XPath Components XPath syntax contains the following components: StepsA directory-like syntax for defining elements and attributes at some specified level /customers/customer/lastName = current] Descent steps Steps that may occur at any level in an XML structure //lastName Filters Elements or attributes that must be present to result in a match /customers/customer[country] Predicates Condition that must be met to result in a match /customers/customer[country=“United States of America”]

22 XPath Node Set FunctionsXPath provides a number of functions that operate on sets of nodes: count() The number of nodes in a set /customers/customer[count(order) = 1], e.g., customers with only one order position() Returns the position of an XML node in a set of nodes: /customers/customer[position() = 1], e.g., first customer last() Returns the ordinal of the last node in a set /customers/customer/order[position() = last()], e.g., last order of each customer

23 XPath String FunctionsXPath has three commonly used string functions: contains() Returns true if string in first argument contains the second //customer[contains(jobTitle,”chief”)] string-length() Returns integer number of characters in string //customer[string-length(lastName) > 3] substring() substring(str,start,length) returns substring of str starting at character start with number of characters equal to length //customer[substring(city,0,3) = “Los”]

24 Other XPath Functions XPath number functions Boolean functions: sum()sum(products/product/price) Boolean functions: false() true() not() //customer[not(count(orders) = 0)]

25 XPath Expressions XPath supports numerical, Boolean, and comparison expressions: Create complex predicates //customer[count(orders) > 0 and State = “California”] XPath unions Return the union of two node sets //books | //articles

26 XPath Axes XPath axis specifies the direction of node selection from the context node: Child Child nodes of the context node Parent Parent node of the context node Ancestor All ancestors of the context node Descendent All descendents of the context node Attribute Attributes of the context node

27 Axes Examples /customer/lastName //firstName //drive/@letter/child::customer/child::lastName //firstName desendant::firstName //drive/attribute::letter //folder[parent::folder and not(child::file)] Subdirectories with no files

28 Introduction to XSLT XSLT is an acronym for eXtensible Stylesheet Language – Transform. Designed to transform an input XML parse tree into a parse tree for the output—often XML or HTML. The transformations are defined as templates in a style sheet, with extension xsl. .Net provides several classes to support this operation.

29 XSLT Template Processing // processing defined for the // matching node set Processing consists of: Literals that are sent directly to the output Templates with their results sent to the output An XSLT stylesheet can have an arbitrary number of templates. Templates are processed at two points in time: When the transformation is first invoked Whenever is encountered during processing

30 apply-templates The current selection is matched against all templates in the stylesheet. Each match executes the matching template’s processing. The results are sent to the output.

31 for-each // processing for selections Each element of the matching node set is processed according to the body of the template. Results are sent to the output.

32 value-of Template Instruction Returns the value of the selected node The selection is from the context defined by the template selection (see previous slide).

33 Example The links, below, refer to an example of XSLT processing, executed on a web server, to render a web page based on contents of an XML file: Other references for XSLT

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