Creating the Design
In the SPS design, you specify:
1.What content (from the XML document or DB) should go to the output; additionally content can be inserted directly in the SPS for inclusion in the output;
2.How the output should be structured; and
3.What presentation (formatting) properties are applied to the various parts of the output.
Content for output
The content for the output can come from:
1.The XML document or DB, or from multiple XML documents and the DB, to which the SPS is applied. Content from the XML document is included in the SPS by dragging the required XML data node from the relevant schema tree in the Schema Tree sidebar and dropping this node at the desired place in the SPS.
2.An external XML document that is accessible to the application (that is, to StyleVision or an Authentic View (a graphical XML-document-editor available in the Altova products XMLSpy, Authentic Desktop, Authentic Browser, and StyleVision) product). By using the doc() function of XPath 2.0 in an Auto-Calculation, content from external XML document sources can be accessed. An XML document accessed via the doc() function in an XPath expression does not need to be referenced via the Schema Sources associations.
3.The SPS itself. Text and other content (such as images and tables) can be inserted directly in the SPS using the keyboard and other GUI features. Such input is independent of the XML document.
4.Manipulated dynamic (XML source) data, with the manipulations being achieved using XPath expressions. Manipulations are typically achieved with Auto-Calculations.
5.For the HTML output, JavaScript functions can be used to generate content.
Structure of output
In the SPS design, the structure of the output can be controlled by using either: (i) a procedural approach, in which the output structure is specified in an entry-level template (StyleVision's main template) and can be independent of the structure of the XML document; (ii) a declarative approach, in which template rules are declared for various nodes (StyleVision's global templates), thus generating an output that follows the structure of the XML document; or (iii) a combination of the procedural and declarative approaches. In Design View, you can use a mix of main template and global templates to obtain the desired structure for the output document. The use of Modular SPSs and Design Fragments provides additional flexibility in the way an SPS is structured.
Presentation (or formatting) of the output
In Design View, presentation properties are applied to design components using CSS styles. Styles can be defined locally on the component, for HTML selectors declared at the document level, and for HTML selectors declared in an external CSS stylesheet. Additionally, certain HTML elements can be applied to components using predefined formats. Specifying presentation properties is described in detail in the section, Presentation Procedures.