-A P P E N D I X

A P P E N D I X D

The XML Export File

Introduction

You can save your design as XML (the extensible markup language) by choosing this format from the Save As dialog. If you wish to know more about XML, try the following URL:

http://www.w3.org/XML/

The X-Designer XML file is a description of the design and the widget hierarchy. The following information can be included in the XML description:

Widgets

Motif resources

Code generation file names

String, font, pixmap and color objects

Code structure for objects

Callbacks and methods

XML files provide a basic description which can be converted into other formats using an XML-based tool and an XSLT (extensible stylesheet transformation) stylesheet. You might wish to turn your design description into a presentation or extract help documentation from it.

Another possibility is to convert the XML into HTML capable of being displayed in a web browser. As an example of the possibilities of the XML save file format, a sample XSLT stylesheet is provided to demonstrate how to convert the exported XML into HTML. The resulting HTML file neatly formats a list of all the widgets in the design. You are given an overview of the contents of your design and any resources that you have set. You are also able to move quickly between the widgets by using the hyperlinks provided.

Using the Exported XML File

This section describes how to take the XML file saved from your design, convert it to HTML and display it in a web browser.

Requirements

To convert the exported XML file into an HTML file ready to be displayed in a web browser, you need the following files. These are supplied with X-Designer so that you can try this for yourself and as an example of how the XML can be used:

xddoc.xsl. This is the XSLT stylesheet for building the main HTML page.

xddocindex.xsl. This is the XSLT stylesheet for building a widget index HTML page.

transform.sh. This is a small shell script that invokes the transformation engine.

xddoc.css. This is an HTML Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that gives the generated page its color scheme.

spacer.gif. This is a small image used in the layout of the sample HTML page.

index.html. This is an HTML index page that links the two HTML pages generated by the transformation.

In addition, you will need the following software:

A Java Virtual Machine. You can download the latest Java distribution from http://java.sun.com.

An XML parser and an XSLT engine. These are freely available on the Internet. The "XP" XML parser and "XT" XSLT engine written by James Clark work well. They can be downloaded for free from http://www.jclark.com and can be found on the X-Designer CD-ROM.

A web browser such as Internet Explorer (version 5 or later) or Netscape (version 4.7 or later).

Preparation

Before you can do the conversion from XML to HTML, you need to set some path variables. The following instructions tell you how:

1. Edit transform.sh and set the CLASSPATH environment variable to include your XML and XSLT toolkits.

This will be either JAR files or package names. Documentation provided with the XML parser and XSLT engine should give you the names to use.

2. Make sure that the Java Virtual Machine is in your PATH.

Converting the XML File

To convert your exported XML file into HTML, run the following command on the command line (assuming that your file is in the current directory):

1. Run the following command from the command line (assuming that your file is in the current directory):

sh transform.sh YourXMLFile.xml

Running this command results in two new HTML files:

widgetindex.html

widgethier.html

2. View the new HTML files by loading the general purpose index.html into your browser.

Note that only a single widgethier.html file is generated. If you started with a large X-Designer design, a very large HTML file would be produced. This may take your browser some time to load.

You can extend and modify the sample XSLT stylesheets and HTML to suit your presentation needs.