Skip to main content

Simple XML/XSLT Navigation

This post presents an example on how to transform a navigation XML with a parameterized XSLT in order to produce a simple site navigation.

Navigation XML

The navigation XML is produced using one of the TBBs described in my earlier posts:

Navigation XML format:

<tcm:ListItems ID="tcm:1-1-4" Title="Root">
  <tcm:Item ID="tcm:1-2-4" Title="010 About Us" DisplayTitle="About Us" Url="/about-us">
    <tcm:Item ID="tcm:1-3-64" Title="010 Who are we?" DisplayTitle="Who are we?" Url="/about-us/who-are-we.html"/>
  </tcm:Item>
  <tcm:Item ID="tcm:1-4-64" Title="020 Contact Us" DisplayTitle="Contact Us" Url="/contact-us.html"/>
</tcm:ListItems>

Navigation XSLT

The full XSLT is available for download. This XSLT takes as parameter the current Page TCMURI as string (parameter name PageUri). It transforms the navigation XML, by identifying the tcm:Item corresponding to the Structure Group parent node of the current Page:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:fn="http://www.w3.org/2005/xpath-functions"
    xmlns:tcm="http://www.tridion.com/ContentManager/5.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    exclude-result-prefixes="fn tcm xsl">

  <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" method="html" />

  <xsl:param name="PageUri" />

  <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="tcm:Item[tcm:Item/@ID=$PageUri]">
    <xsl:call-template name="output-parent-sg">
      <xsl:with-param name="parent-node" select="."/>
    </xsl:call-template>

    <xsl:call-template name="output-sg">
      <xsl:with-param name="parent-node" select="."/>
    </xsl:call-template>

    <xsl:call-template name="output-page">
      <xsl:with-param name="parent-node" select="."/>
    </xsl:call-template>

    <xsl:apply-templates/>
  </xsl:template>

The template continues to apply three transformations:
  • output-parent-sg: outputs a link to the parent Structure Group relative to the current Structure Group, if the parent is not the Root Structure Group. The link URL assumes the default page in the parent Structure Group is index.html. The link text is the value of the parent's attribute DisplayTitle;
  <xsl:template name="output-parent-sg">
    <xsl:param name="parent-node"/>
    <xsl:if test="$parent-node/../@Url">
      <ul>
        <li>
          &lt;-- <a href="{$parent-node/../@Url}/index.html"><xsl:value-of select="$parent-node/../@DisplayTitle"/></a>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </xsl:if>
  </xsl:template>
  • output-sg: outputs a list of links to all sub-Structure Groups relative to the current Structure Group;
  <xsl:template name="output-sg">
    <xsl:param name="parent-node"/>
    <ul>
      <xsl:for-each select="$parent-node/tcm:Item[fn:ends-with(string(@ID),'-4')]">
        <xsl:sort select="@Title"/>
        <li>
          <a href="{@Url}/index.html"><xsl:value-of select="@DisplayTitle"/></a> --&gt;
        </li>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </ul>
  </xsl:template>
  • output-page: outputs a list of links to all Pages within the current Structure Group. The current Page ($PageUri) is highlighted in bold and it is not rendered as link;
  <xsl:template name="output-page">
    <xsl:param name="parent-node"/>
    <ul>
      <xsl:for-each select="$parent-node/tcm:Item[fn:ends-with(string(@ID),'-64')]">
        <xsl:sort select="@Title"/>
        <li>
          <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="@ID=$PageUri">
              <b><xsl:value-of select="@DisplayTitle"/></b>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
              <a href="{@Url}"><xsl:value-of select="@DisplayTitle"/></a>
            </xsl:otherwise>
          </xsl:choose>
        </li>
      </xsl:for-each>
    </ul>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

The Transformation

In this example, I'm using the <x:transform> tag from REL Standard Tag Library (RSTL) to perform the XML / XSLT transformation.

The following code is part of the Dreamweaver TBB on a Page Template that outputs the navigation:

<c:import url="/wfaf/system/navigation.xml" var="nav-xml"/>
<c:import url="/wfaf/system/navigation.xslt" var="nav-xslt"/>

<x:transform doc="nav-xml" xslt="nav-xslt">
  <x:param var="PageUri" select="@@Page.ID@@" />
</x:transform>

Each Page published on the given Page Template will parameterize the transformation by substituting the DWT variable @@Page.ID@@ with its real value (e.g. tcm:1-2-64).

The Output

Executing the Page produces the following output:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A DD4T.net Implementation - Custom Binary Publisher

The default way to publish binaries in DD4T is implemented in class DD4T.Templates.Base.Utils.BinaryPublisher and uses method RenderedItem.AddBinary(Component) . This produces binaries that have their TCM URI as suffix in their filename. In my recent project, we had a requirement that binary file names should be clean (without the TCM URI suffix). Therefore, it was time to modify the way DD4T was publishing binaries. The method in charge with publishing binaries is called PublishItem and is defined in class BinaryPublisher . I therefore extended the BinaryPublisher and overrode method PublishItem. public class CustomBinaryPublisher : BinaryPublisher { private Template currentTemplate; private TcmUri structureGroupUri; In its simplest form, method PublishItem just takes the item and passes it to the AddBinary. In order to accomplish the requirement, we must specify a filename while publishing. This is the file name part of the binary path of Component.BinaryConten

Event System to Create Mapped Structure Groups for Binary Publish

As a continuation of last week's Publish Binaries to Mapped Structure Group , this week's TBB is in fact the Event System part of that solution. Make sure you do check out the previous post first, which explains why and what this Event System does. To reiterate, the Event System intercepts a Multimedia Component save, take its Folder path and create a 1-to-1 mapping of Structure Groups. The original code was written, again, by my colleague Eric Huiza : [ TcmExtension ( "MyEvents" )] public class EventsManager  : TcmExtension {     private Configuration configuration;     private readonly Regex SAFE_DIRNAME_REGEX = new Regex ( @"[\W_]+" );     public EventsManager() {         ExeConfigurationFileMap fileMap = new ExeConfigurationFileMap ();         fileMap.ExeConfigFilename = Path .GetDirectoryName( Assembly .GetExecutingAssembly().Location) + "\\EventSystem.config" ;         configuration = ConfigurationManager

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as