How to pass parameters to XSLT?

Question

I have a problem.

I have an XML file that contains information about 100 courses.

I have an XSL file that nicely displays the list of 100 courses.

But what if I want to only display 1 course. Can I pass a parameter to the XSLT file to tell it to only display "ENGL 100" ?

The XML looks something like this:

<document>
<menu>
   <item>
      <name>MTH 300</name>
      <brief>Mathematics Skill Development</brief>
      <description>A course in the fundamentals of ...</description>
   </item>
   <item>
      <name>MTH 301</name>
      <brief>Basic Algebra</brief>
      <description>An introduction to algebra, ...</description>
   </item>
 ...

I know I could write an XSLT file called "eng100.xsl" to loop through the XML and display only ENG 100 but I don't want to have to write dozens of these files.

The XML is dynamic and I am able to control it. I want the XSLT file to be static and never change.

Is there any way to pass parameters into the XSLT?

Affright

Please note that the answer depends in part on which XSLT engine you're using and how you're invoking it. – Airlike

Answer 1

You can pass parameters to XSLT, how this is done depends on your XSLT processor, but usually as additional command arguments, if it's a command-line processor.

You declare parameters using

  <xsl:param name="courseName" select"initialValue"/>

You can then test this parameter in your XSLT, and invoke a different template depending on it's value. For example, if the parameter is empty, then invoke the current template that processes all elements, otherwise invoke a template that only processes elements when the item name equals the parameter value. You can do this with a test

   <xsl:template match="item">
      <xsl:if test="$courseName=name(./name)">
         <xsl:call-template name="yourOriginalTemplate"/>
      </xsl:if>
   </xsl:template>

But by filtering and formatting, you are mixing two concerns in one file. I would separate out the selection of the XML elements from formatting - have two xslt files for that and run them as a pipeline.

Biconvex

Also, for some scenarios, you could use a "metadata" input document that drive the transformation and access "data" document with document() function. This will cost in efficiency. – Shirleeshirleen

What if the xml document has a processing instruction <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="mytransformation.xsl"?> Is it possible to pass the xsl parameter to the xml file by url-encoded name=value parameter? I mean, can i do something like this then: mycontent.xml?courseName=MTH300 – Atbara

Answer 2

Very old question I know -but just in case it helps somebody. If you are using any server-side scripting engine - consider using HTTP Params: you can link to the XSL like this (assuming a PHP backend here)

<?xml-stylesheet href="myxsl.xsl.php?my_param=abc" type="text/xsl"?>

Note the renamed file to '[...].xsl.php' - and we'll need to set 'content-type' back to 'xml' as well:

The contents of the XSL can then be mixed with a small amount of server-side code to set up an XSL variable. For example:

<?php header('Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8'); ?>
[...]
<xsl:variable name="my_param"><?=$_GET[my_param']?></xsl:variable>

Sestertium