Attention geeks: need help on ASP 3.0 and XML

[no name no slogan]

Hi everyone, I could really use some help (or directions to good resources) on displaying XML via Active Server Pages (3.0, the "old-fashioned" version).

I'm redoing the navigation on a large website (80 static & 50 dynamic pages), and am hoping to use a combination of ASP and XML to render the elements.

I have one XML file which holds all the attribute information for each link (url, caption, type, etc.) and another file that will hold the order/structure of the links-- basically a site map.

I'm going to transform the XML on the server-side because I know that not all of the site's visitors are using the same platform, so I figured it would be easier to do it this way.

Is it possible for ASP to read through the second XML file (site map file) and attach the attributes to each link from the first XML file? Or do you have any online/offline resources which have come in handy for something like this?

I hope this makes sense to ANYONE out there. I'd like to get it done this week if possible, but I can wait, too. :D

[Kamika]

1. I'm a geek

I don't have a clue what the heck you're talking about though. Sorry

[Radical__Moderate]

2. Yes it quite simple with XSLT

Let say we have one XML file called links.xml of the form

<links>
    <link id="1">
       <title>link1</title>
       <href>page1.html</href>
    </link>
    <!-- more Links -->
</links>

in the XSLT file define a template such as

<template match="sitemap">
   <table> 
   <for-each select="document('links.xml')/links"/>
      <tr>
         <td>
            <a>
              <attribute name="href">
                 <value-of value-of select="href"/>
              <attribute>
              <value-of select="title"/>
            </a>  
          </td>    
      </tr>         
   <for-each>
   </table>
<template>

The trick is using the XSLT function 'document()' in the for-each.

I hope this helps

Also if you down load the product XMLSPY from www.altova.com they include an example web site in their examples that does Exactly what you need

[no name no slogan]

3. This helps-- thanks!

I'll give this a shot it looks like exactly what I need!

Will this also work for non-MS browsers, like the Gecko-based ones? I assue it will work with all "modern" browswers that support the latest standards (i.e., post-4.x of Netscape/IE, CSS compliance, etc.)? I assume it will because it's just churning out valid HTML.

Thanks for the tip :D

[Radical__Moderate]

4. If you do the transform server side

You will not need to worry.

I have only found IE to be able to transform w3c compliant XSL to standards so you better do this on the server if you expect anybody to be using another user agent.

The asp code for doing and xslt transform in asp Javascript is

var xDoc=Server.CreateObject('Microsoft.XMLDOM');
var xXSL=Server.CreateObject('Microsoft.XMLDOM');
xDoc.async=false;
xXSL.async=false;
xDoc.load(Server.MapPath('the_xml_file.xml'));
xXSL.load(Server.MapPath('the_xsl_file.xsl'));
Response.Write(xDoc.documentElement.transformNode(xXSL.documentElement));