Creating an XSL Extension in C#

Tags: c# xml xsl

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: <xsl:value-of select="ext:Proper(@FirstName)"/><br />
      Last Name: <xsl:value-of select="ext:Proper(@LastName)"/><br />
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

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