XSLT - Learned the hard way

I never really cared about learning or using XSL and XSL style sheets in my projects. But then I was wrong, I should have mastered this, it is an important weapon in a SharePoint consultant's arsenal.

In this blog post I try to note down my experience with XSL so that I can refer back to this again later.

1. If you see characters like ampersand (&) appearing as & in your List view with custom XSL template then you got to disable output escaping.

disable-output-escaping="yes"

2. For one of my projects I had to dynamically bind a URL field in a DataView webpart. The requirement was to display different views (InfoPath) of a list based on two column values in the list. One of these values was set by a work flow.

There are different ways to do this and there may be better ways of achieving this but this is how I did it:

  <xsl:choose>
           <xsl:when test="@Status1 = 4 and @Status2 = 4">
            <a  onclick="javascript: NewItem2(event, &quot;/sites/Intranet/Lists/Change/Item/editifs.aspx?ID={@ID}&amp;DefaultView=View2&amp;IsDlg=1&quot;); return false;" href="/sites/Intake/Change/" title="{@Title}">
       <xsl:value-of select="substring(@Title,1,30)" disable-output-escaping="yes" /></a>
          </xsl:when>
          <xsl:when test="@Status1 = 5 and @Status2 = 5">
            <a  onclick="javascript: NewItem2(event, &quot;/sites/Intranet/Lists/Change/Item/editifs.aspx?ID={@ID}&amp;DefaultView=View1&amp;IsDlg=1&quot;); return false;" href="/sites/intranet/" title="{@Title}">
          <xsl:value-of select="substring(@Title,1,30)" disable-output-escaping="yes" /></a>
          </xsl:when>
        </xsl:choose>

In the above code I'm choosing between View1 or View2 based on the value of the fields Status1 and Status2.

It would have been better to just set a variable and not the entire Anchor in the xsl:when, much more to learn!

3. Format Date in DataView Webpart

The following XSL can be used to format date in DataView web part:

ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@SomeDate),4105,'dd-MMM-yyyy') 

To get format date and time in 12 hour format:

ddwrt:FormatDateTime(string(@SomeDate),4105,'dd-MMM-yyyy hh:mm tt')

4105 is the LCID more of which can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?id=221435

4. There is no Modified By available within XSL, you have to use @Editor.title to get the display name.

5. In a DataView Webpart you could do grouping and this is how it appears on browser:

If you want to get rid of that Group By column name you need to remove the following XSL from the webpart:

<b>
<xsl:value-of select="$fieldtitle" />
</b>
<xsl:if test="$fieldtitle">: </xsl:if>

And this is how it appears after:

To be continued..