Sat, 15 Jan 2005

Quote Manager Project -- Day 2

So now I know how to read XML data and, using Java 5.0, transform it into HTML. I also have an XSL style sheet that duplicates the look and feel of my current quotes page. Again I find myself wondering what to do next. Again I will put on my customer hat and consider what I want. Let's look at the original plan:

• I want to change the quotes page to be sorted by quoter. There should be a list of all the quoters at the top. Their names should link down to their quotes on the page below.
• I want to use a simple Swing application to manage the quotes.
• The Swing app will store the quotes in XML. The app will have the ability to transform this XML into HTML via XSLT.

OK, sorting in XSL is easy. I just had to add two lines beneath my <xsl:for-each>...

		<xsl:for-each select="quotes/quote">
			<xsl:sort select="quoter"/>
			<xsl:sort select="author"/>

Actually, this is good. It looks like I'm going to need to change my XML data structure in order to allow for the sorting I need. I'm glad I chose to do this task before the XML update spike, since the data format would have changed. Pulling into the station...

OK, I've changed the XML data format to break quoter and author names down into first and last names like:

		<quoter url="http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/">
			<first>Gerald</first><last>Weinberg</last>
		</quoter>

		<xsl:for-each select="quotes/quote">
			<xsl:sort select="author/last"/>
			<xsl:sort select="author/first"/>

My next task is to spike reading and updating the XML file from Java. I wonder if I could use some of my XSL transformation code? It looks like the first half of my previous spike could come in handy...

        DocumentBuilderFactory factory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder builder = factory.newDocumentBuilder();
        Document document = builder.parse("sample.xml");

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