Design Approaches

Stylus Studio supports bottom-up and top-down approaches to designing XML pipelines. The approach you take depends largely on personal preference, but it can also be influenced by factors such as whether, for example, your XML pipeline will use existing transformations (like XQuery or XSLT) or you will build them specifically for use in the XML pipeline.

The following section is intended to give you some ideas for XML pipeline design.

Understand the Requirements

Regardless of which approach you choose, you should understand the goal of the XML pipeline before you start building it. For example, you should know

For the purposes of describing bottom-up and top-down design approaches in this section, imagine that the requirement for our XML pipeline is to reder data in a text file as PDF.

Bottom-Up Design

Using a bottom-up design approach, we would then use these source files to build our XML pipeline using the following steps:

When you use a bottom-up approach, Stylus Studio leverages as much of the existing information in the documents you use to build the XML pipeline as possible. Depending on your design environment, you might need to alter the paths specified for input and output nodes, source documents, and so on, and you will typically have to link the nodes in your XML pipeline by creating pipes between appropriate output and input nodes.

Top-Down Design

The top-down approach results in a rough outline of placeholder nodes of the desired XML pipeline - an abstract or conceptual representation of the code we want to generate to perform XML processing. The next steps would be to:

Once these documents are created, they can be used to define nodes that represent them in the XML pipeline. You can do this