The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) technology transforms an XML document into another format or representation. For example, one common use of XSLT is to convert XML documents into HTML for display in a browser. XSLT has many other uses, including converting XML data to another format, such as converting XML in a vocabulary used by an order entry application into a vocabulary used by an order fulfillment application.

XSLT transforms an XML document by applying an Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) stylesheet. (When stored in a file, XSL stylesheets typically have the .xsl extension.) ColdFusion provides the XmlTransform function to apply an XSL transformation to an XML document. The function takes an XML document in string format or as an XML document object, and an XSL stylesheet in string format, and returns the transformed document as a string.

The following code:

1. Reads the simpletransform.xsl stylesheet file into a string variable.
2. Uses the stylesheet to transform the mydoc XML document object.
3. Saves the resulting transformed document in a second file.

<cffile action="read" file="C:\CFusion\wwwroot\testdocs\simpletransform.xsl"
    variable="xslDoc">
<cfset transformedXML = XmlTransform(mydoc, xslDoc)>
<cffile action="write" file="C:\CFusion\wwwroot\testdocs\transformeddoc.xml"
    output=transformedXML>

XSL and XSLT are specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For detailed information on XSL, XSLT, and XSL stylesheets, see the W3C website at www.w3.org/Style/XSL/. There are also several books available on using XSL and XSLT.