sontek

Although XSL is very powerful, I’m sometimes more comfortable with doing certain operations in C# and luckily it is pretty simple to call C# libraries from XSL.

First, you’ll need the code that you will call from XSL, this can just be a normal POCO, doesn’t have to be anything specific to XML/XSL:

 

    public class StringExtension

    {

        public string Proper(string data)

        {

            CultureInfo cultureInfo = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;

            TextInfo textInfo = cultureInfo.TextInfo;

            return textInfo.ToTitleCase(data.ToLower());

        }

    }

 

Then you need to use the XsltArgumentList class to add an extension object to your Xsl Transform:

 class Program

    {

        static void Main()

        {

            XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument("data.xml");

            XslCompiledTransform trans = new XslCompiledTransform();

            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

            StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);

            trans.Load("stylesheet.xslt");

            XsltArgumentList args = new XsltArgumentList();

            StringExtension ext = new StringExtension();

            args.AddExtensionObject("ext", ext);

            trans.Transform(doc, args, sw);

            Console.WriteLine(sw.ToString());

            Console.ReadLine();

        }

    }

 

Now all you have to do is register the namespace in your XSL (i.e xmlns:”ext”) and you can use the extension by calling ext:Proper():

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

    xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt" exclude-result-prefixes="msxsl"

    xmlns:ext="ext"

 >

  <xsl:output method="text" indent="yes"/>

  <xsl:template match="/">

    <xsl:for-each select="People/Person">

      First Name: 


      Last Name: 


    </xsl:for-each>

  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>