Design question: Handling multiple documents?

[Raber Chris <cp...@yahoo.com>]

This is not a Xalan question per se, but more of a
design question in the context of XSL based
applications. If I should be looking to some other
forum, please advise.

Context: I have a mini transcoding service that takes
source HTML documents and transforms them into a
presentation suitable for small footprint browsers
(e.g. AvantGo). It is a servlet that uses Xerces/Xalan
to do its handy work.

What it does is:

1. Fetch a page using GET or POST;

2. Run the source HTML through JTIDY (to turn it into
well-formed XHTML);

3. Transcode into the resulting page using a style
sheet.

The Question:

What about the case where the results of HTTP GET/POST
returns a different document layout? For example,
consider a query that searches for people by name. In
the case of match on only one name, the detail for
that person is returned. In the case of multiple
matches, a list of people to choose from is returned.
In the case of no match, an error response is
returned.

When writing a style sheet to handle all these cases,
would you simply have different pattern matches for
each case? Or would you look for which type of
response has been received, and then chain in a second
style sheet to handle that specific case? Is the
latter approach possible?

TIA,

-Chris.

Chris Raber, Systems Engineer, AvantGo.
http://www.avantgo.com/

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