Using Zimlets with XSLT

[jmnielsen]

Hello all,

I am new to zimlets and I'm doing a little preliminary investigation of what would be involved in using them. Our department is considering using zimlets in the future, and I happen to have a little knowledge with using XSLT and I wanted to learn more about how it could potentially be used with zimlets. From what I've read zimlets are xml-based (or at least use xml) and can communicate using SOAP. I guess my basic question is how it might be possible to manipulate or control the way zimlets behave by using XSLT to format the XML content. Is there any documention on this at all? I have searched for articles about zimlets and XSLT and discovered almost nothing. Do you have any recommendations on where I can look or what I should look at/for to familiarize myself with the basics of zimlets and possible applications with XSLT? Any responses or suggestions would be much appreciated.

Many Thanks,

Josh

[jmnielsen]

Is there a moderator or anyone sufficiently knowledgeable about this topic to even point me in the correct direction? Doing a few topic searches I saw that some people were coupling together .xml files (possibly from a SOAP response) and a custom defined .xsl file to make a useful transformation of the xml. How much of this is necessary and intrinsic to developing custom zimlets? If not necessary how may it be incorporated? Even one specific example would do.

P.S. Some other topics here that mentioned using XSL: Help with First Zimlet (seems to be defining custom xml and xsl files), SOAP and XSLT, and Custom zimlet XML parsing error. In line with those topics, what is the relevance for using .xsl files with XML or SOAP in Zimlets (i.e. what were they using them for, and what else can the be used for)?

Thanks,

Josh

[rrao]

Originally Posted by jmnielsen

Is there a moderator or anyone sufficiently knowledgeable about this topic to even point me in the correct direction? Doing a few topic searches I saw that some people were coupling together .xml files (possibly from a SOAP response) and a custom defined .xsl file to make a useful transformation of the xml. How much of this is necessary and intrinsic to developing custom zimlets? If not necessary how may it be incorporated? Even one specific example would do.

P.S. Some other topics here that mentioned using XSL: Help with First Zimlet (seems to be defining custom xml and xsl files), SOAP and XSLT, and Custom zimlet XML parsing error. In line with those topics, what is the relevance for using .xsl files with XML or SOAP in Zimlets (i.e. what were they using them for, and what else can the be used for)?

Thanks,

Josh

Hi Josh,
Please find the attached com_zimbra_xslt example. It uses xsl stylesheets to style the xml response thats returned from a service(like amazon, yahoo etc).

thanks,
Raja

[jmnielsen]

Thank you very much Raja!

Is there by chance an online community database of files and packages like that that users submit which can be reused by others? If so it might be worth looking through such files for more examples like that.

Also, forgive my denseness, but can this only be run from inside Zimbra? I ask because it would be interesting to execute this for testing from a command line (would you have to use a build tool like ANT?). And I presume I would have to produce the interface/code to send and receive queries to/from the Web Service in order to get the XML that these *.xsl files transform? And at that, I'm not even sure I'd know at this point how to plug this "zimlet" in to Zimbra. I assume there are user guides to show how this might be run and tested within Zimbra?

I'd appreciate any additional information or feedback you could give be about these questions.

Thanks,

Josh