JSTL: JSP Standard Tag Library Kick Start By Jeff Heaton
Table of Contents
Chapter 8. Accessing Data with XML Tags
Considerable data is now available in the form of Extensible Markup Language (XML). Web pages often need to access XML data and display it. JSTL provides a range of XML tags that allow you to perform a variety of operations on XML data.
The JSTL tags enable you to iterate over XML data and perform comparisons on XML data using XPath expressions. You can also access individual elements of data within an XML document using XPath. In this way, you can customize the display of your XML using many of the JSTL tags you are already familiar with.
In addition, the JSTL tag library allows you to process data using Extensible Stylesheet Language templates (XSLT). By creating an XSL template, you can transform your XML data into HTML output, or even another XML document.
The XML tag library consists of three logical groups. The core tags perform the basic parsing and access to individual elements. Flow-control XML tags allow you to iterate over element collections and perform logical operations based on XPath expressions. Transformation operations allow you to use XSLT documents to reformat XML documents. We examine all three categories in this chapter. But first, let's look at XPath, a standard way of specifying sections of an XML document. The JSTL XML tag libraries make extensive use of XPath.
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