Oracle XDK 10g Unicode Support and XSLT Extension Sample Application

Table of Contents

Introduction 

• Prerequisite
  
  
• Technical Overview

Prerequisite 

To understand this sample you must have working knowledge of eXtensible Markup Language (XML)  , eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XSLTransform (XSLT) . You should have a conceptual background of different kinds of character encodings.  The sample has been implemented in Java so it is expected that you are familiar with Java and related technologies.  Knowledge of J2EE web application architecture would be an added advantage. Though not required; familiarity with Oracle databases is desired.

Note : The message translations to French have been done by an automated tool

Technical Overview

This sample application illustrates the following features:

• Encoding XML documents in different character sets ( UTF-8, UTF-16,  ISO-8859-1 )
• Sending and receiving XML documents over HTTP along with character encoding information
• Using single style-sheet for multilingual HTML page generation with the help of XSLT extension function facility provided by Oracle XDK 10g
• Storing XML documents in XMLType column of Oracle database along with appropriate encoding
  
• Generating XML documents on using Oracle XDK 10g DOM API's along with encoding attribute
  

Application Overview 

This application demonstrates a simple Real Estate portal called as E*Stator.com. This sample application supports two languages, English and French.

There are two groups of users who can use this applicaion. The two roles are that of a user and an administrator.

User : Users can use this portal to search for houses that are available for Rent or Sale.
Administrator : The administrators are allowed to add, edit, delete property records.

The entire application can be used in any of the two supported languages. Whenever new property details are uploaded they must be supplied to this application in an XML format. The encoding chosen by the user is used to store the data in XMLType column and vice versa.

Application Design 

This application has been implemented as a pure J2EE web application. The user interface is generated using JSP's, XML and XSL stylesheets. Any browser like IE 5.5.and later or Netscape 7.1  and later can be used to view the application.  The application extensively uses Java API's and Oracle XDK 10g.  Oracle XML DB ( Oracle 9.2.0.2 or later ) is used as a datastore. 

This application demonstrates the usage of locale sensitive transformations using XSLT extension. This is explained with the help of the following diagram:

In this application, the User is allowed to choose language as 'English' or 'French' and the choice is passed as a parameter to the JSPs. However, in general, the Locale object is readily available through the request object method getLocale() (the value gets set based on the user preference set in the browser or operating system). For further details on locale awareness and other details of determining the session locale, please refer the Oracle Application Server 10g Globalization Support Guide

• Database Schema Design
  This application stores its information in a relational table in Oracle database. The table has name "property_tab". This table has 2 columns.
  1. PROPERTY_ID  VARCHAR2(20) PRIMARY KEY
  2. PROPERTYXML XMLType
  

ScreenShot

This is how the main page of the E*Stator application looks like.

Sample Application Files 

This section provides a tabular listing of the sample application files, along with their respective directory locations and a description of what they do in the overall scheme of the application:

Readme file and Stylesheets

Other files/directories

Setting up the Sample Application 

Glossary/Bibliography 

Additional References 

• OTN Sample Code index page 
• OTN XDK Sample index page 

We hope you find this README file helpful. This file was prepared by Abhijeet Kulkarni .  For any additional help/information please post your questions in the OTN Sample Code Discussion Forum.