About the FileMaker XSLT Extensions

All XSL transformations need to be performed by an XSL processor of some kind. An XSL processor should conform to some standard flavor of XSL (currently 1.0). But XSL processors are also free to add their own extensions; like proprietary extensions to Web browsers, this practice stands to increase the range of actions you can perform with a given XSL stylesheet, but risks the creation of stylesheets that work well with only one XSL processor. Stylesheets for CWP work well in only a FileMaker environment anyway, so this is not a serious concern.

The Web Publishing Engine's XSLT processor obviously adds some extensions because it's capable of triggering FileMaker database actions. But it also has a host of other extended capabilities. Some of these you've seen already, such as the capability to access all the parameters of the HTTP request that invoked the stylesheet. With similar syntax, you can get access to the user 's IP address, username, and password, as well as the address of the server from which the stylesheet is being served .

FileMaker also provides XSL extensions to handle a host of other common Web programming tasks . There's a rich library of string-manipulation functions, as well as a set of functions to send email, a set of functions to create and maintain user sessions, and functions to deal with HTTP headers and cookies. Unfortunately, a full treatment of all these areas is beyond the scope of this book, but the documentation that accompanies FileMaker Server Advanced describes these functions fairly thoroughly.

The point to be aware of here is that FileMaker's XSL implementation is actually a full-featured Web programming language as well, and has many of the features of powerful modern Web programming languages such as Perl, PHP, or JSP. After you're familiar with the basics of combining XSL stylesheets with FileMaker database actions, you can delve further into the other rich features of the CWP XSL implementation.