{"id":139,"date":"2007-02-17T13:15:41","date_gmt":"2007-02-17T18:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"\/cgi\/wp\/?p=139"},"modified":"2007-02-18T19:57:48","modified_gmt":"2007-02-19T00:57:48","slug":"xml-xsl-livevideo-api-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"XML & XSL – LiveVideo API"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I created a web part to show video comments using the LiveVideo<\/strong> API. The API returns XML so I had to format it using XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) which is a stylesheet for XML. I used Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition. Unfortunately, the XSLT editor\/debugger features are only included in the Professional and higher levels of Visual Studio 2005. Since many web services and APIs (Application Programming Interface) return XML, I thought it was worth the time to explore transforming XML through XSL.<\/p>\n

I ran into three problems requiring solutions. First, I had to display an image using the web address for the image found in an XML tag. Second, I had to format a date that wasn’t in a very readable format. Third, I wanted to alternate the table row colors.<\/p>\n

For the first problem involving the image, I found the solution at TopXML<\/a>. The exact syntax gave me a lot of problems because you should not use the @src<\/strong> they show.<\/p>\n

<<\/font>img<\/font>><\/font>
\n<<\/font>xsl:attribute<\/font> name=\"src\"<\/font>><\/font>
\n<<\/font>xsl:value-of<\/font> select=\"profileThumbnail\"<\/font> \/><\/font>
\n<<\/font><\/code>\/<\/code>xsl:attribute<\/font>><\/font>
\n<<\/code>\/<\/code>img<\/font>><\/font><\/code><\/font><\/p>\n

For the second problem involving the date format, I found the solution at John Workman's weblog<\/a><\/font>. You need to use another XSL template to format a date. I had to edit his FormatDate template because it did not format the date as I wanted it.<\/p>\n

<<\/font>xsl:call-template<\/font> name=\"FormatDate\"><\/font>
\n<<\/font>xsl:with-param<\/font> name=\"DateTime\" select=\"entryDate\"\/>
\n...................<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/<\/code>xsl:call-template<\/font>><\/font><\/code><\/p>\n

For the third problem involving alternating table row background colors, I found the solution at William Pohlhaus’ Web Site<\/a><\/font>. It is a neat trick using the XML element position and the math function mod.<\/p>\n

<xsl:if<\/font> test=\"position() mod 2 = 1\">
\n<\/font><<\/font>tr<\/font> bgcolor=\"#EFF3FB\"><\/font>
\n<\/<\/code>xsl:if<\/font>><\/font>
\n<<\/font><\/font>xsl:if<\/font> test=”position() mod 2 = 0″>
\n<<\/font>tr<\/font> bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”><\/font>
\n<<\/font>\/<\/code>xsl:if<\/font>><\/font><\/font><\/code><\/p>\n

After solving those problems for my web part I explored XSLT using PHP. Unfortunately, my web hosting company does not appear to have any of the required extensions installed to support XSLT in PHP. I have PHP 5.0 installed on my local web server and I found the following code works:<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/span>\/\/ Load the XML source
\n<\/span>$xml <\/span>= new <\/span>DOMDocument<\/span>;
\n<\/span>$xml<\/span>-><\/span>load<\/span>(<\/span>'LiveVideo.xml'<\/span>);<\/span><\/span>$xsl <\/span>= new <\/span>DOMDocument<\/span>;
\n<\/span>$xsl<\/span>-><\/span>load<\/span>(<\/span>'LiveVideo.xsl'<\/span>);<\/span> <\/span><\/code>
\n\/\/ Configure the transformer
\n<\/span>$proc <\/span>= new <\/span>XSLTProcessor<\/span>;
\n<\/span>$proc<\/span>-><\/span>importStyleSheet<\/span>(<\/span>$xsl<\/span>); <\/span><\/code>
\n\/\/ attach the xsl rules<\/span>
\n<\/span>echo <\/span>$proc<\/span>-><\/span>transformToXML<\/span>(<\/span>$xml<\/span>);<\/span>?><\/span> <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/code><\/code><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I created a web part to show video comments using the LiveVideo API. The API returns XML so I had to format it using XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) which is a stylesheet for XML. I used Visual Studio 2005 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}