XSD Editor Generate Documentation Using Custom Templates

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It is possible to provide your own templates to the XSD Schema Documentation Generator. The generator uses XSLT 2.0 to perform the code generation, so you must supply one or more XSLT stylesheets.

The XSLT stylesheet operates on an XML document that is generated from the XSD schemas.
The schema for this can be found at <Installation Folder>/DocTemplates/SchemaInfo.xsd.

The HTML and ASP.Net templates are provided for reference and can be found in

<Installation Folder>/DocTemplates/XsdToAspx
<Installation Folder>/DocTemplates/XsdToHtml

The following Folders and files have special meaning. There location is relative to the initial XSLT style sheet provided to the generator.

StaticFiles - The contents of this folder will be copied directly into the output folder (this includes all sub folders and files). This folder is optional, if it's not found no error is raised.
PreTransform.bat - This is executed after the SchemaInfo.XML, and image files are generated, but before the XSLT transform is run. It allows the Image files or SchemaInfo.XML file to be moved or pre-processed. This file is optional, if it's not found no error is raised.

Example

If your setup is as follows

Template file c:\Templates\MyTemplate.xslt
Output folder c:\MyDocs

When the code generation is run the following steps are performed.

The images are written to <Output Folder>\Images
In this example c:\MyDocs\Images
The contents of the <Template Folder>\StaticFiles is copied to <Output Folder>
In this example the contents of c:\Templates\StaticFiles is copied to c:\MyDocs
The Batch file <Template Folder>\PreTransform.bat is executed.
In this example c:\Templates\PreTransform.bat is executed.
The XSLT Transform is executed.
In this example c:\Templates\MyTemplate.xslt, with the output folder set to c:\MyDocs.

Start off using the templates in '<Installation Folder>/DocTemplates/XsdToHtml'.

You will need to reference the 'Main.xslt' file when you generate the code.

Start off by tweaking 'SchemaTemplate.xslt' in order to get a better understanding of how the templates work.

The source data file 'SchemaInfo.XML' is deleted after the generation has completed, when developing the XSLT transforms it is often useful to keep this file, so you can re-run the transforms without having to go through the wizard. You can get a copy of this file by adding the following line to the 'PreTransform.bat', the file will be copied to the output folder.

Copy SchemaInfo.XML SchemaInfo_copy.XML

If you have the source file and the transforms you can then execute and debug the transform within the Liquid Studio environment - see XSLT Debugger Overview

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