XQuery vs XSLT for transforming data

Question

What do you use in your applications for transforming XML data to other data types? WHY?

Good question: +1. See my answer for an informed opinion. – Dimitre Novatchev Jun 09 '10 at 13:00 — Dimitre Novatchev, Jun 09 '10 at 13:00

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 09 '10 at 12:59

While XQuery can be used for simple transformations, it lacks the power and sofistication of XSLT (especially templates and the <xsl:apply-templates> instruction).

XSLT is a language that was especially designed to process tree structures. It is still best at doing this.

In cases when accessing an XML database it would be a good decision to use (the efficiency of) XQuery to extract the necessary XML nodes and then do the transformation with XSLT from here on. Some XSLT 2.x / XQuery processors do allow this (via extensions) even now. The next wave of XSLT 2.x/XQuery 1.x specifications will most probably make such interoperability an official feature of these languages.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 09 '10 at 08:15

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If you look at the Wikipedia Entry they have a section that compares the two.

In my view I see XSLT as a Programmable presentation layer for data.

answered Jun 09 '10 at 08:15

Darknight

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score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 09 '10 at 07:33

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It depends what type of "transformation" you need, XQuery allows you to perform queries on your XML data, a bit like SQL.

XSLT allows you to apply a style on XML, like CSS does with HTML.

answered Jun 09 '10 at 07:33

Romain Deveaud

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I totally disagree with the statement "XSLT allows you to apply a style on XML, like CSS does with HTML.". XSLT is not to XML what CSS is to HTML. CSS tells a processor how to display the HTML. XSLT is used to transform the data into something else. You can use XSLT to transform XML to HTML so that a processor knows how the data should be displayed, but how the processor displays the resulting HTML has nothing to do with XSLT. – Daniel Haley Jun 11 '10 at 01:42
XSLT is far more sophisticated than CSS. With XSLT you can add/remove elements and attributes to or from the output file. You can also rearrange and sort elements, perform tests and make decisions about which elements to hide and display, and a lot more. – Premraj May 20 '15 at 12:10

XQuery vs XSLT for transforming data

3 Answers3