Using pre compiled XSLs

Hi All,

We are on TS7.2.
We are using TPLs for DCR transformation and then DD to deploy the content to DB. Now we are changing the system and want to use XSL transformation to convert the content entered into the DCR to proper HTML chunks before deploying to DB. For that I have tried the following:

1. Do not want to move from traditional TPL to XSLT TPL as thhis will be a lot of effort and we do not have that now.
2. Using iwov_xslt from the tpl files. In this I am passing XML content and the XSL file then getting the transformed content back. Working fine.
3. Can use XML::XSLT perl module as well to transform the content. Checked working fine.

Now, I want to use pre compiled XSLs here. We are having lot of XSL for each type of content modules and for better performance, pre compiled XSL seems to be better option.

Can this group help provide suggestion on this can be achieved? Other suggestions on improving the performance are also welcome.

Note: I did some reading and can see that there are command line tools are also available to pre compile but the xalan.jar provided with TS does not have those classes.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Adam Stoller

Have you done any benchmarking for your actual scenario to determine if the potential performance improvement is actually meaningful?

On the front-end, if you were performing transformations in "real-time" I could see this being an important thing - but on the back-end where you are generally processing a handful of files at a time (perhaps just one) and then delivering the results to a database (from which it can be accessed quickly on the front-end) does it really make all that much sense?

That being said, it does sound kind of interesting, and as such would be nice to know what you eventually figure out - but I have a feeling that the performance issues you may have might be somewhere else (for instance, you are paying a performance cost for using TPLs because they require the initiation of a new shell process to run a new Perl process each time -- so switching to "pure" XSLT TPLs might improve your performance more consistently / significantly than trying to compile the XSLT code you are trying to use via Perl TPLs.

If performance is an issue on the back-end, I suggest you try to find a way to capture some real numbers from real-life usage of the system to verify where you are running into performance issues. (Once, many years ago, I improved the performance of a customer's TeamSite implementation by 60% just by re-writing their Perl code - the document used to be on the Support site as a KB, but I think it got lost, so I included it here)

wait.rptdesign

Rick Poulin

Note: I did some reading and can see that there are command line tools are also available to pre compile but the xalan.jar provided with TS does not have those classes.

I'm not endorsing this approach by any means, but the above statement is false. You must've missed the part where the XSLTC requires these 4 jars to be in your classpath. Since you're running this off the cmdline, you need to specify them explicitly.

From TeamSite\lib (which is one of the many places where those 4 jars can be found..)
> java -cp ./serializer.jar;./xml-apis.jar;./xalan.jar;./xercesImpl.jar org.apache.xalan.xsltc.cmdline.Compile