As a huge XSL fan, I am very happy to use xsl as the view in our proprietary MVC framework on ASP.
NET. Objects in the
model are serialized under the hood using .
NET's xml serializer, and we use quite atomic xsl templates to declare how each object or property should transform.
For example:
<xsl:template match="/Article">
<html>
<body>
<div class="article">
<xsl:apply-templates />
</div>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="Article/Title">
<h1>
<xsl:apply-templates />
</h1>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="@*|text()">
<xsl:copy />
</xsl:template>
This mechanism allows us to quickly override default matching templates, like having a template matching on the last item in a list, or the selected one, etc. Also, xsl extension objects in .
NET allow us just the bit of extra grip that we need. Common shared templates can be split up and included.
However
Even though I can ignore the verbosity downside of xsl (because Visual Studio schema intellisense + snippets really is slick, praise to the VS-team), the downside of not having intellisense over strongtyped objects in the
model is really something that's bugging me.
I've seen ASP.
NET MVC + user controls in action and really starting to love it, but I wonder;
Is there a way of getting some sort of intellisense over XML that we're iterating over, or do you know of a language that offers the freedom and declarativeness of XSL but has the strongtype/intellisense benefits of say webforms/usercontrols/asp.
net.mvc-view?
(I probably know the answer: "no", and I'll find myself using Phil Haack's utterly cool mvc shizzle soon...)
