VelocityTransformer

This transformer uses Velocity, specifically Anakia to transform the XML with Velocity templates. Anakia uses JDOM XML objects to make it easy to work with the XML and further extends the Element object to add direct support for XPath evaluations.

The following objects will be available to each Velocity template:

Context Objects

Name	Description
$req	The HTTP request object
$res	The HTTP response object
$ses	The HTTP session object
$app	The servlet context
$root	The root element of the stxx-created XML document
$msg.getMessage($string)	Retrieves the localized message from the appropriate application resources
$relativePath	The absolute path to the web application directory
$escape.getText($string)	This context object will convert HTML Entities in the $string that is passed into it and it will return the converted String. This is good for dealing with CDATA. The entities that are converted are: " -> &quot; | < -> &lt; | > -> &gt; | & - > &amp;

All node lists returned from Anakia (extended JDOM) objects through $element.selectNodes, $element.content, and $element.children have two special features:

• they support the selectNodes method just as a single element does that applies an XPath expression to all nodes in the list, and
• when inserted into template output by simply specifying $list, they produce the XML fragment consisting of all nodes they contain. This eliminates much of the #foreach code in templates.

For more information, visit the Anakia page.

• The features of Velocity
• Easier to pick up than XSL
• Supposedly faster than XSL transformations

	Global

Global stxx.properties properties

Property	Value	Status
mimeType	The mime type of the transformed content	Required
templateEncoding	The conventional encoding specification for the Velocity templates as supported by your JVM, for example "UTF-8" or "ISO-8859-1".	Optional
outputEncoding	The conventional encoding specification for the output as supported by your JVM, for example "UTF-8" or "ISO-8859-1".	Optional

	Transform-specific

These parameters are specified in stxx 1.2+ pipeline configuration format. See Configuring with Struts 1.1 for more information.

Transform-specific parameters

Parameter	Value	Status
path	The path to the Velocity template file	Required
debug	true | false (default)	Optional

	Examples

Global configuration:

stxx.transformer.velocity.class=com.oroad.stxx.transform.VelocityTransformer
stxx.transformer.velocity.mimeType=text/html
stxx.transformer.velocity.encoding=ISO-8859-1

Transform-specific configuration:

<pipeline match="velocity/*.dox">
 <transform type="velocity">
    <param name="path" value="/{1}.vm" />
 </transform>
</pipeline>