4-Aug-04 (Created: 4-Aug-04) | More in 'Howto'

Taking advantage of Generic Transformations in Aspire

Aspire has a unique concept called generic transformations. These generic transformatons come handy while developing web pages as debugging tools and also discovery tools. A web page in Aspire has data and a transformation. Data is defined in a configuration file. Generic transformations allows you to retrieve data in various generic formats such as "text" and "xml" and "excel" with out ever painting a page.

Using this facility you can retrieve data before starting to write a JSP page or an Aspire tags page. This data importantly also shows the column names or meta data which is useful at the time of painting. Advanced applications can even convert this data to a typed language class.

Start with a URL


http://host:port/servlet/DisplayServlet?url=TestJSPURL

You can request textual represenation of data


http://host:port/servlet/DisplayServlet?
    url=TestJSPURL
	&aspire_output_format=text

Note the additional url argument "aspire_output_format". This will print the textual representation of the data on the web page. The printed data will include field names as well as the rows.

You can request xml representation of data


http://host:port/servlet/DisplayServlet?
    url=TestJSPURL
	&aspire_output_format=classic-xml

This will give XML representation of data on the browser. In ie the output look pretty nicely formatted. In Mozilla it looks like a single long string but the XML is there. To be able to do this You need to have the XML related jar files in the lib directory. See the XML support documents for Aspire to see what these jar files are.

Or you can request data in object xml format as well


http://host:port/servlet/DisplayServlet?
    url=TestJSPURL
	&aspire_output_format=object-xml

You can also see a table worth of data as html

For example if there are two loops called loop1 and loop2 in data, you can see them as html tables. 


http://host:port/servlet/DisplayServlet?
    url=TestJSPURL
	&aspire_output_format=html
	&aspire_loopnames_to_render=loop1,loop2

Required Builds

Build 19.2 is preferred as earlier builds have a bug with Tomcat 5.x