Symphony.

I’ve recently developed a project called XSL Tracer. Its goal is to answer the question: “Where does the output element came from after XSL transform?”

You can see demo here. This page shows result of xsl transformation, click on any element to see its source (XML document) and output template (XSL document). More info on project page

The project intended for online usage, especially for developers who uses XSL as template language in CMS. There’s a free online service for tracing XSL transforms at http://xmltools.ru/ Just put urls of your XML and XSL files and press Transform button. The tracer will automatically download all the imported/included XSL and XML documents (so they should be reachable) and show you the trace result.

The project is in alpha stage. I hope Symphony CMS users will find it useful.

Craig and I have been playing with it when serge_che emailed the Symphony team a couple of days ago (sorry I haven’t replied yet.)

The service is very awesome and uses some very funky tech!

Yes, quite impressive, thanks Sergey. A nice tool for XSLT users.

Unfortunately, Symphony doesn’t actually output physical XML files so I’m not sure how useful the online tool will be for our users in a system context. Instead, I’ve been trying to imagine how it might help us improve our own debugger, but since this tool is implemented in Java/Saxon I’m not sure whether there’s any applicability there.

In any case, this is really great work we will definitely keep an eye on the project going forward. Thanks so much for reaching out to us :)

In case of XML file, it doesn’t need to be a physical file — it can be any url that produces a valid xml data. In my project, to trace http://mysite.com/about/, I need to pass something like http://mysite.com/about/?show_xml=true to XML url field. My CMS also don’t have any physical XML files and everything works fine.

The whole idea is to work as online service, so you can setup a remote host for tracing trasforms as I did with xmltools.ru and use it for all Symphony installations

Maybe the debug devkit can be enhanced to provide a plain XML output, and a plain XSLT output for use with this tool?

it can be any url that produces a valid xml data

Right that’s what I mean. By default Symphony doesn’t output its raw source XML anywhere

Maybe the debug devkit can be enhanced to provide a plain XML output, and a plain XSLT output for use with this tool?

Perhaps…

I have been spending sometime with an XML Editor called Ximplify. It has the ability to open a url, but at present, my method for getting the Symphony XML into it is to copy and paste the raw XML from the Symphony’s debug environment.