SLAX Elements and Element Attributes Overview

SLAX Elements

SLAX elements are written with only the opening tag. The contents of the tag appear immediately following the opening tag. The contents can be either a simple expression or a more complex expression placed inside curly braces. For example:

The XSLT equivalent is:

Using these nesting techniques and removing the closing tag reduces clutter and increases code clarity.

SLAX Element Attributes

SLAX element attributes follow the style of XML. Attributes are included in the opening tag and consist of an attribute name and value pair. The attribute syntax consists of the attribute name followed by an equals sign and then the attribute value enclosed in quotation marks. Multiple attributes are separated by spaces.

Where XSLT allows attribute value templates using curly braces, SLAX uses the normal expression syntax. Attribute values can include any XPath syntax, including quoted strings, parameters, variables, numbers, and the SLAX concatenation operator, which is an underscore (_). In the following example, the SLAX element location has two attributes, state and zip:

The XSLT equivalent is:

In SLAX, curly braces placed inside quote strings are not interpreted as attribute value templates. Instead, they are interpreted as plain-text curly braces.

An escape sequence causes a character to be treated as plain text and not as a special operator. For example, in HTML, an ampersand (&) followed by lt causes the less-than symbol (<) to be printed.

In XSLT, the double curly braces ({{ and }}) are escape sequences that cause opening and closing curly braces to be treated as plain text. When a SLAX script is converted to XSLT, the curly braces inside quote strings are converted to double curly braces:

The XSLT equivalent is: