Technical Blog Post
Abstract
Creating UTF-8 Documents with XSLT
Body
Implementing XSLT with Special Characters/Umlauts
Are you onboarding new trading partners in EMEA or Asia? You need to create Business Data that contains Umlaut / Special Characters? Let me introduce you to an Example that makes usage of the XSLT Service in IBM Sterling B2B Integrator. It can be used to convert XML Style data into other Documents. In this Example we will use an XSLT to transform some Business Data into an HTML Reply Document that you can use to pass back information to an incoming web request.
- Lets assume that you get some input data into your Business Process. It can be e.g. the result of an availability check in your ERP System. We will simulate this in this example by assigning some static data in the BP
- This Business Data is then transformed into a Primary Document and stored in the BusinessProcess
- Once we have that Primary Document we will use the XSL Transformation to convert it into an HTML Document
First we will discuss the Business Process:
- First we assign a value to a data node
- Then we create a Primary Document by converting that node into a standalone XML Document
- Finally we take that Primary Document and process it with the XSLT Service
<process name="xsltGreetingTest"> <sequence> <!-- create test input data --> <assign to="RootNode/INPUT/DATA">Hello World</assign> <!-- create Primary Document --> <assign to="." from="DOMToDoc(RootNode,'PrimaryDocument')" /> <!-- process Primary Document with XSLT --> <operation name="AddGreetings"> <participant name="XSLTService"/> <output message="XSLTServiceInputMessage"> <assign to="xml_input_from">PrimaryDoc</assign> <assign to="xml_input_validation">NO</assign> <assign to="xslt_name">withGreetings</assign> <assign to="." from="*"/> </output> <input message="inmsg"> <assign to="." from="*"/> </input> </sequence> </process>
The XSLT File
In this sample XSLT file there are several interesting points to focus on. Since it converts Data from Process Data into a HTLM Document we need to take care of formats and encodings in more than one place.
-
in the
xsl:outputdirective you have to setmethodtohtmlto make sure that the created output syntax is correct -
you also set
encodingtoUTF-8to make sure that the resulting Primary Document is actually filled with UTF-8 characters when doing the XSL Transformation -
Inside the
htmlTag you setMETAInformation to make sure that the Web Browser that reads this HTML file will be able to make the right assumptions about the content -
Setting
contenttotext/htmlmakes sure that the webbrowser understands this data as displayable web page -
charset=UTF-8instructs the Web Browser to take the correct input filter when parsing the HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
<META content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<b>
<xsl:if test="string-length(normalize-space(INPUT/DATA)) > 0">
<xsl:value-of select="INPUT/DATA"/><xsl:text> </xsl:text>
</xsl:if>
</b>
</div>
<div>
<p>Mit freundlichen Grüßen</p>
<p>こんにちは！</p>
</div>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
The combination of the settings above makes sure that the resulting Primary Document will be stored in UTF-8 in the Sterling Integrator. This makes sure that the following steps in the BP can read the data back in and work with it as Unicode Characters. It also makes sure that the payload itself has processing information included for the Web Browser so that it knows how to deal with the data.
UID
ibm11121835