Xopus supports a lot of XSL features. There a only a very few things to keep in mind when using an XSL for Xopus, but there is a boatload of tricks you can use to make the XSL work better in Xopus.

Every element from the XML that you wish to edit, needs to be represented in the output of the XSL. That means that templates that match on an element should output at least something, even if the element itself is empty. The following XSL could cause problems: <xsl:template match="section"> <div> <h2> <xsl:value-of select="title"/> </h2> ... When the title is empty, the title will not be rendered in the output. It has nothing to represent it. Thus it might be difficult to get the cursor into the element to type a title. Using the following example solves that: ​<xsl:template match="section"> <div>   <xsl:apply-templace /> ... <xsl:template match="section/title"> <h2> <xsl:apply-templates /> </h2> </xsl:template> When the title is empty, the <h2> will still represent the title element, this making it much easier to edit.

XSL can be used to hide and show different parts of an XML document. You can think of meta-data and the actual content. It can be used to show more than just WYSUIWYG output, like buttons to add, remove or move elements or to provide more functionality to edit an element.

Using a special feature in XSL in Xopus you can make API calls for elements. <xsl:template match="date"> <p><b onclick="editDate(node);"><xsl:apply-templates/></b></p> </xsl:template> In the above example editDate is a user defined function. This function gets passed an argument, node. This argument refers to the node of the template, which in this case is the <date> element. The node object is an Xopus DOM Object, such as an XopusElement.

When an XML file becomes large, the output of a simple stylesheet will equally become large, and this can Xopus to slow down. The Xopus Team has successfully used XSL to output the XML in a smarter way. This document, for example has sections. Currently all the sections are layed out, but functionality could be added to hide all sections except one. First we define a parameter in the XSL: <xsl:param name="currentNode" select="//section[1]"/> This selects the first section in the document. From then on we can compare other elements to the currentNode parameter using an XPath function. <xsl:if test="generate-id($currentNode) = generate-id(.)"> ... </xsl:if> This can then be used in if and choose statements to define what to do when the currentNode matches the current template node. For more information about this, contact support@xopus.com. To set the currentNode parameter you can use the API: Editor.Canvas.getActiveCanvas().setViewParam("currentNode",node); We can demonstrate this in this example. Execute the following line of code to turn on the hiding of section content. Only section titles will show, unless the currentNode is contained in the section. Be careful though, most likely this section will be hidden. You can use the table of contents to make it visible again. ​Editor.Canvas.getActiveCanvas().setViewParam("hideSectionContent","true"); Use the following code to turn it off: ​Editor.Canvas.getActiveCanvas().setViewParam("hideSectionContent","false"); Take a good look at the xsl:param elements in the stylesheet.xsl, and at what happens in the <xsl:template match="section"> in that same file.