The <xsl:template> Element

An XSL style sheet consists of a set of rules called templates.

Each <xsl:template> element contains rules to apply when a specified node is matched.

XSL uses Templates

The <xsl:template> element contains rules to apply when a specified node is matched.

The match attribute is used to associate the template with an XML element. The match attribute can also be used to define a template for a whole branch of the XML document (i.e. match="/" defines the whole document).

The following XSL Style Sheet contains a template to output the XML CD Catalog from the previous chapter:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">
 <html>
 <body>
   <h2>My CD Collection</h2>
   <table border="1">
     <tr bgcolor="#9acd32">
       <th>Title</th>
       <th>Artist</th>
     </tr>
     <tr>
       <td>.</td>
       <td>.</td>
     </tr>
   </table>
 </body>
 </html>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Since the style sheet is an XML document itself, the document begins with an xml declaration: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>.

The <xsl:stylesheet> tag on the second line defines the start of the style sheet.

The <xsl:template> tag on the third line defines the start of a template. match="/" associates (matches) the template to the root (/) of the XML source document.

The rest of the document contains the template itself, except for the last two lines that defines the end of the template and the end of the style sheet.

The result of the transformation will look (a little disappointing) like this:

My CD Collection

Title	Artist
.	.

If you have Netscape 6 or IE 5 or higher you can view: the XML file, the XSL file, and the result

The result from this example was a little disappointing, because no data was copied from the XML document to the output.

In the next chapter you will learn how to use the <xsl:value-of> element to select the value of an XML element.

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