Building Oracle XML Applications

Understanding Input and Output Options

The XSLT transformation process described earlier was explained in terms of node trees. These trees of nodes are the logical form that both the source and result of a transformation can take on the “inside” of a transformation being performed by an XSLT processor. However, this is what happens on the outside:

• The source document typically begins as a stream of human-readable characters.

• The result of the transformation typically needs to be written out as another stream of human-readable characters—for example, to send the result back to a requesting browser or to save the result in a file for later.

The input to an XSLT transformation must be a tree of source nodes produced by either parsing a well-formed XML document or creating the tree programmatically (for example, via DOM or SAX APIs).

All XSLT transformations process the source node tree to produce a tree of result nodes. If multiple transformations are being applied in sequence by your application, the result tree of one transformation becomes the source tree of the next transformation in sequence. When no more transformations need to be done, the final tree of result nodes needs to be written out as a stream of characters again. This process is called serializing the result tree.

Simple-form stylesheets take advantage of default serialization rules described by the XSLT 1.0 specification to make common cases simple. They serialize transformed output in the default UTF-8 character set ...