Is there a good tool for XSL previews?

Question

I'm a LAMP web developer in Perl and at my current place we use some black magic in using Perl to retrieve the data, throw them into a XML and then pass the XML to an XSL file. And this is all handled magically by the almighty AxKit. Thus you can probably imagine that my XSL is full of XSLT lines, i.e. if test,@value etc.

I was wondering if there's any tool, IDE, etc which I can use to open the XSL file and check the HTML preview without having to modify anything in my current XSL?

I'm open for suggestions as long as it gets the job done. Thanks.

Answer 1

XSLT IDEs (Interactive Development Environments):

• XSelerator (the one I've been using for 6-7 years). Free, has a Debugger for MSXML, has intellisense for both XSLT 1.0 and XSLT 2.0. In addition has some dynamic intellisense. The debugger has breakpoints, data breakpoints,visualizes temporary trees, variables, test conditions, current output, ..., etc.
• VS2008 -- a good XML Editor + XSLT Debugger. Good static intellisence. Match patterns are statically checked. Breakpoints, data breakpoints, visualization of variables and the current output.
• oXygen
• XML-SPY (Altova)
• Stylus Studio

XPath tools:

Update:

Both the IE and the FF versions of the XPath Visualizer have now a new, safe home, thanks to the hospitality of Lars Huttar. The links below point to the new, safe site.

• The XPath Visualizer -- A popular IE-based tool for learning XPath and FF-based, too, by playing with XPath expressions. Free and open source. Allows any XPath expression to be evaluated against a given XML document and displayes the results hi-lighted in the xml document (if they are node(s)) or in a separate box (if the results are atomic values). Allows xsl:variable-s to be defined and then used in XPath expressions. Allows xsl:key-s to be defined and then referenced by key() functions within XPath expressions.

Answer 2

I am currently using Visual Studio, open your xml file within visual studio, from XML menu click show xslt output.

Answer 3

I found Stylus Studio to be an invaluable tool for all my XML needs. I never ran it rough Wine though.

Answer 4

I use cooktop which is free.

Answer 5

Try Microsoft XML Notepad

Answer 6

I'm using Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition...under my XML menu all I see is "Schemas..." when I have an XSL file open. Did I miss installing a component for the other options?

Answer 7

A couple of alternatives that haven't been mentioned, yet:

• XML Copy Editor - Okay, but requires an intermediate step to generate HTML and then open HTML in an external browser.
• WMHelp XMLPad - Many minor bugs and annoyances, but otherwise very useful: can review and debug transformations within the IDE.

I wrote a post describing these and a couple of other tools, in case someone is interested: How to test XSL transformations.