[oXygen-user] looking for a good XSLT IDE

[Andrew Welch]

> I've used Oxygen's XSLT debugger a couple of times, but most of the time I
> don't use it. The main reason is that all of my builds involve multiple XSLT
> stylesheets tied together by ANT build files. Isolating the output of one
> step of the process and setting up all the parameters required to run any
> one of the scripts in Oxygen is usually more hassle than simply dropping in
> some <xsl:message> message statements to see what is going on. I write
> content in Oxygen but do most of my XSLT work in JEdit with the AntFarm
> plugin because it lets me launch any target I want with a click.

It's really worthwhile outputting the result of each transform at each
point in the chain for debugging help, or at least mocking them.

> I'd expect that most people will be running XSLT in some wider context and I
> have to think that it is usually going to be cumbersome to extract
> stylesheet and data from that context in order to feed it to the debugger.
> Is there, or could there be, some way to run my ANT builds within Oxygen and
> have the XSLT debugger track all the scripts that are being called and debug
> them?

Its always worth a little effort early on to allow you to see exactly
the inputs and outputs from each step... makes life so much easier
than messing around with xsl:message.

Also, you might find using a "debug" primary stylesheet that imports
your usual primary stylesheet and overrides the parameters with debug
values is helpful, so you don't have to continually set them up in the
IDE.



-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/