Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Solving Typical Navigation Problems

Transformations are fairly straightforward when your source tree and result tree have pretty much the same overall structure. However, things can sometimes get pretty messy when they don't. I have on several occasions encountered application extract files from which EDI systems could not produce the desired output and vice versa. The only way around these types of problems is to write pre- or postprocessing programs to restructure the extract or import file.

Even though I've earned a few extra consulting fees by coding such auxiliary programs, I can't tell you how thrilled I am to report that I have yet to see or imagine an XSLT transformation that needed this type of preprocessing. XSLT with XPath expressions ...