Google appliance Front End development

Question

I am wondering about the best way to be efficient while building a GSA frontend (xslt).

I am starting from the OOB you can get in GSA Admin Panel. You might already know that this file is pretty long (more than 7000 lines of code for the version 7.2). I was wondering if there is any good way to debug the generated XSLT, I am applying the front at the GSA side (build-in feature).

I am new to this whole thing, we just moved to GSA and I have to build a custom search result page as requested by the Marketing.

I am using a server side call foe GSA in .NET code.

I know I can use something like Saxon.net and apply the XSLT in .NET code and be able to debug it, but the requirement is that we use the built-in feature for "proxystylesheet" and "frontend" params in GSA search service (it is not my choice).

Is there a way to check the errors (I am sure I will get some) when the XSLT is applied by GSA?

Answer 1

You will need java for this to work.

Debugging the XSLT from the GSA frontend can be quite complex. Saxon9 is the only approach that worked for me.

I would not bother much with the Microsoft XSLT tools, as you would need to modify the GSA XSLT to even start debugging, which is a bad idea in itself.

First off, you will need to export all the dependency the XSLT has such as other xsl, css and js files. If thats too much, here is a link from which you can download them.

1. Create a folder with the above dependencies.
2. Save the xml from the search results in the same folder. (Remove proxystylesheet query parameter and don't forget to include getfields=* if you are testing manipulation of metadata using xslt) - search.xml
3. Save the xsl you want to debug in the same folder. - frontend.xsl
4. Download Saxon 9 and extract the zip to the same folder.

use the following command to test the xslt.

java -jar c:\<<Folder with the everything>>\saxon9.jar -t search.xml frontend.xsl > test.html
call start firefox test.html

If there are bugs, they will be revealed when you run the above command.