BIP XSL-TEXT Templates : Part 1

Just a quick one from me today as I am of to sunny Birmingham for the weekend.

I've blogged a lot recently about ETEXT Templates and how they are used in BI Publisher to generate text files for EDI and EFT:

ETEXT Part 1

ETEXT templates are a great way of creating simple fixed or delimited text files and the Oracle Payments team have delivered loads of predefined ETEXT templates for Payments processing.

However, they are not the only way to generate text files from BI Publisher!

It is also worth considering XSL-TEXT templates.

I've found that XSL-TEXT templates are really just XSLT scripts that transform the XML into text output only.

Note:
xsl:text is actually an element or command of XSLT to write literal text strings, entity references and #PCDATA to the output file.

If you are scratching your head over what XSLT is... then, a great reference to get you up and running quickly is the W3schools tutorial.

In my next post, I'll walk through some examples of XSL-TEXT templates - but first, I have to go and join the queues of traffic trying to leave London. No fun at 5pm on a Friday night!