Expert Spring MVC and Web Flow

Returning XML in the Raw

An interesting use case for the XSLT Viewis actually to avoid transforming the XML at all and

simply return it raw. You can easily achieve this by opting notto specify a value for the

stylesheetLocationproperty on your View.

Figure 8-7 shows the output of our home page after we comment out the

stylesheetLocationproperty in views.properties.

Figure 8-7.XML output in the client

Why would you want to do such a thing? It’s possible that your application’s clients are not

humans but rather machines. In the simplest case, you could be providing something like an

RSS feed for news clients.

Larger systems might use it as a decoupling strategy. The view layer from one part of the

service emits a known XML variant so that it can be used as input by one or more content ren-

dering engines (CREs). These CRE applications are then free to concentrate on generating the

actual end product—probably for multiple device types and languages. Separation of con-

cerns at a higher level!

Other Noteworthy XSLT Features

Before we move on, it’s worth mentioning a couple of other features specific to Spring’s

XML/XSLT support. We’ll take a brief glance at number and date formatting and stylesheet

parameterization.

254 CHAPTER 8 ■SUPPORTED VIEW TYPES