Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

10.6. XSLT in Brief

When you select a data source for a Data View, SharePoint queries that source and returns the results in XML. Although XML is a text-based format, it can be very difficult for human beings to read, so XML is usually processed through an eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transform (XSLT). XSLT is used to transform XML data from one format (or schema) into another. This transformation is based on templates created in the eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), which is itself an implementation of XML.

This section describes how XSLT is managed in SharePoint Designer. While some aspects of XSL are introduced as needed in passing, this is not intended to be a full tutorial on the nuances of XSL itself.

In many ways, XSLT is a programming language — it consists of instructions on how to render the incoming XML data. Like most languages, it has syntax, contains keywords, can abstract data in variables, and has control structures to allow different renderings based on conditions in the data. The XSLT markup generated by SharePoint Designer intersperses static HTML markup with the dynamic data from the XML source.

Although SharePoint Designer uses XSLT to transform XML data into browser-readable HTML, the language itself can be used to transform XML data into virtually any other text format, including a different pure XML schema.

Because XSL is a markup-based language, each command or statement in XSL is a bracket (<>) tag set. Because it is an XML implementation, every ...