Best XSLT Editor &| Debugger [closed]

Question

Other than Visual Studio, what tool have you found best to create, edit, maintain, and possibly debug your XSLT files?

I work on a fairly big project and we have tons of XSLT files and they have grown quite complex in their implementation.

The language seems so brittle. It would be nice to navigate and identify errors more quickly.

Answer 1

I've had good results using Oxygen for XSLT debugging, XPath building, and general XML stuff.

Answer 2

Liquid XML Studio is pretty good at real-time interpretation of your XPATH queries.

Cooktop also lets me run my XPATH queries and shows me the XML and HTML generated by running the XSLT against a given XML.

Also, a colleague tells me that newer versions of Adobe Dreamweaver allows you to associate an XML file with an XSLT file and run the transformation.

Whenever possible i use Subversion for change-tracking.

And for navigation, i most often use VIM (or VIEmu) and sometimes a custom Visual Studio extension that builds an index of the current document's xsl:template and xsl:variable nodes to provide one-click navigation to the root entries.

Answer 3

In my shop we use, Altova Xml spy.

Answer 4

I've actually been doing some of this myself recently, and I find that if you're a .NET developer, Visual Studio actually has pretty fair support built right in for xslt files.

Answer 5

I used to use a tool called Xselerator from Marrowsoft. You can find trial versions floating around the internet but they seem to have gone out of business so you can't buy it anymore. It was a great tool.

Answer 6

In addition to Visual Studio's natural abilities here (I think the debugger is particularly strong), there's also a profiler add-in: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/xsltprofiler.

Answer 7

I also use Xselerator. As mentioned, one day it just disappeared from the internet. Luckily I licenced it before then.