After I’ve finally managed to persuade IE7, FF and Transform jQuery plugin to work with my XSL documents, I’ve started testing the other two browsers I have: Opera and Chrome. The latest release of Opera might occasionally work. Chrome fails (as expected) as it doesn’t support xsl:import. Welcome to the next round of browser incompatibilities.
I’ve decided to ignore Chrome until the great minds @ Google decide to implement XSLT properly. Visitors using it will have reduced experience … but of course I have to detect whether I should use XSLT or not.
Here’s a small Christmas gift if you have similar issues: a jQuery extension that checks whether the current visitor can use XSLT transformations.
jQuery.xslt = {
need: function(success,url,xml) {
var componentCount = 0;
var xslt;
var el;
var debug=1;
function tryTransform() {
if (typeof(xslt) != 'object') return; // XSL did not parse into XML object
var html = $.transform({xmlstr: xml, xslobj: xslt, async: false});
alert("html="+html);
if (!html) return;
}
function gotScript() {
function transformFail(html,xsl,xml,obj,ex) {
if(debug) alert ("$.xslt.need failed:"+ex.message); }
function transfromDone(html,xsl,xml,obj) {
$.xslt.has = html.search($.xslt.expectedResult) >= 0;
if ($.xslt.has && success) success();
}
el = $("<div>");
el.transform({xmlstr: xml, xsl: url,
success: transfromDone, error: transformFail});
}
url = url ? url : $.xslt.defaultURL;
xml = xml ? xml : $.xslt.defaultXML;
$.getScript($.xslt.transformScript,gotScript);
},
has: false,
defaultURL: "/forms/xml/static.xsl",
defaultXML: "<section />",
transformScript: "/common/js/jquery.transform.packed.js",
expectedResult: /table/i
}The extension implements a simple function and a property: $.xslt.need() and $.xslt.has. You can pass the URL to the sample XSL document and the sample XML markup to the need function; it also supports a success callback to tell you whether you should install XSL-related action handlers.
The need function loads the jQuery Transform plugin (reducing the load time if the page does not need the XSLT functionality) and tries to transform a sample XSL document. The sample transformation should be as complex as possible: you should use xsl:import, xsl:include or the document() function if you use them in other transformations.
You could change the default parameters in the source code or write a setup function.
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