XML, XSLT and modifying the DOM w/Javascript

[scoomey]

Hi folks, I've got what I think is an interesting problem that I'm
having trouble finding a solution for. I have an XML document that I
render to the browser via an XSLT transformation to XHTML. I want the
output to include links to a JavaScript routine that I will write to
modify the original XML, but it seems that once the XML is rendered to
XHTML it is no longer in scope of the DOM; only the XHTML output is. IS
there any way to get DOM-level access to the original XML?

Thanks,

Shawn

[Martin Honnen]

scoomey wrote:

I have an XML document that I
render to the browser via an XSLT transformation to XHTML. I want the
output to include links to a JavaScript routine that I will write to
modify the original XML, but it seems that once the XML is rendered to
XHTML it is no longer in scope of the DOM; only the XHTML output is. IS
there any way to get DOM-level access to the original XML?

Are you using client-side XSLT, that is you let the browser transform
the XML? In that case with IE 6 and MSXML 3 the original XML DOM
document is exposed as the property
document.XMLDoc ument
of the HTML DOM document.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/

[scoomey]

Bingo! Thanks Martin.That's exactly what I am doing. I'm going to gove
that a try. I wish there was a cross-browser way to get to the XML
tree, but if not I can live with IE6.

[scoomey]

It worked perfectly. I was able to modify the underlying XML without a
problem... however, is there a way now to "re-apply" the XSL
transformation so that the view reflects the changes to the underlying
XML DOM?

thanks!

[Martin Honnen]

scoomey wrote:

I was able to modify the underlying XML without a
problem... however, is there a way now to "re-apply" the XSL
transformation so that the view reflects the changes to the underlying
XML DOM?

That is possible in theory as those are MSXML DOMDocument objects with
e.g. a transformNode method so you have
document.XMLDoc ument
and
document.XSLDoc ument
as well where then
document.XMLDoc ument.transform Node(document.X SLDocument)
would give you the string result of the new transformation. Thus if you
only want to do that once then
function showTransformat ion () {
var xmlDocument = document.XMLDoc ument;
var xslDocument = document.XSLDoc ument;
document.open() ;
document.write( xmlDocument.tra nsformNode(xslD ocument));
document.close( );
}
showTransformat ion()
should do.

But in general you probably don't want to run the complete
transformation and overwrite the complete document but rather you might
want to change some part of the XML and then update only part of the
HTML document. There is however no direct support for that, you will
somehow need to build your own update function and mechanism.
--

Martin Honnen
http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/