Parameterized Formatting of an XML Document by XSL Rules

Abstract

The possibilities of formatting offered by database management systems (DBMS) are insufficient and do not allow emphasizing the various data results. It is the same for the usual browsing of an XML document without any particular rules of formatting. The contents of the document is presented according to a basic format, which can be insufficient with regard to the needs of the user. We propose to generate automatically some XSL rules of formatting in order to improve the presentation of the contents of a document. We propose to distinguish the formatting of the various levels of elements as well as the formatting of the attributes, which are associated to them. We also emphasize the attributes and the elements corresponding to keys and reference links. These various parameters of formatting are requested from the user and eventually stored in a file. After the creation of a DOM tree of an XML document, these parameters are taken into account to create automatically XSL rules of formatting which are inserted in an XSL stylesheet. These possibilities of formatting will be applied on the document results produced by XQuery requests on XML documents or on XML views of data managed by database management systems.