[Portfolio] Announcing a tool and docs to help with alternate form renderers

[Ackerman, Erica]

Michigan has done some work to try to make the creation of alternate form renderers (custom renderers) easier. First, Noah created a utility called xslt-façade that makes it much easier to run transformations locally in an application such as Oxygen. The following is from Noah's introduction to the tool:

The process of working with XSLT files for Portfolio Templates and Forms can be laborious to implement when needing to continually upload materials and preview them in a running Sakai installation. U-M has developed a utility to help make this process more manageable. It is called xslt-facade since it provides a façade for the runtime support of Sakai/OSP (by way of the XsltFunctions extension). It allows the XSL files to be created and run offline without any changes, to accelerate the process and afford the use of tools like a debugger.

I then created a document that gives necessary conceptual information about "metaobj" and custom renderers, explains how to set up your environment, and provides a few tutorials on creating custom renderers. The document is aimed at people starting out, preferably who have some familiarity with creating XSD schemas, though that is not necessary.

The xslt-façade utility can be found at:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/OSP/Custom+XSLT+offline+with+xslt-facade

The documentation and supporting files for working through the tutorials is at:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/OSP/Creating+Custom+Renderers

On that page I also included a zip file of XSDs that Gonzalo Silverio created when he was first figuring metaobj out. I found them indispensable when I was just learning about XSDs and custom renderers. They help with custom renderers because they help you understand the way that XSD elements get translated into HTML, which is what you will be doing in your custom renderer.

And while we're on documentation, don't forget about Sean Keesler's related work on creating Portfolio Templates at:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/OSPDOC/Portfolio+Templates

If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.

Erica
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