xml/xslt/jsp Usage patterns...?

[Heath Lilley]

Hello,
I have a question regarding xml, xlst, and jsp.
I'm using...
WebSphere 4.04
Xerces 2.5.1
Xalan 2.5.1
I am currently developing an application that retreives an xml document from a database, applies any of several different xslt documents to the xml file and displays it inside of a jsp. I have done some research and found that most people have the xml and xsl documents as files and use a Transform.transform(Source, OutputStream) to display the transformed xml document.
My questions are...
1. Since my xml document lives in a database is there a way to pass the xml document object to the transformer, or do I HAVE to save it as a file to the server's file system and then pass the path to the 'temporary' document as an argument?
2. The all of the transformer examples I have looked at create an output stream to get the transformed data to the client. Is there anyway I can capture the output and store it into a String or StringBuffer? I realize this is more of an IO issue but I am trying to generate this output to an object that can placed into the session and displayed inside of a jsp page.
Based on what I seen I have to treat the generation of the transformed document as I would the generation of an image. (i.e. I create a jsp with an include tag that calls a url with arguments. That url is to a servlet/action class combo that retrieves the xml transforms it and just spits the data back to the client via the output stream.)
3. Is this a "best practice", acceptable solution or am I going down a wrong path?
Just looking for validation and/or other options.
Thanks for your time.

[Balaji Loganathan]

Originally posted by Heath Lilley:
Hello,
2. The all of the transformer examples I have looked at create an output stream to get the transformed data to the client. Is there anyway I can capture the output and store it into a String or StringBuffer? I realize this is more of an IO issue but I am trying to generate this output to an object that can placed into the session and displayed inside of a jsp page.

Answer to your 2nd question.
Here is the same code for doing this

1:StreamSource xslSource=new StreamSource(new File(xslFileLoc));
2:StreamSource xmlSource=new StreamSource(new StringReader(new String(inputXMLString)));
3:Transformer transformer=TransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer(xslSource);
4:ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
transformer.transform(xmlSource, new StreamResult(out));
5:byte[] content = out.toByteArray();
6 :-o	 ut.flush();

You can the the variable content to write to a file using Java.IO now.
Rgd question 1
The other way(if the XML file is small), you can read the XML file from database,store it on a stringbuffer and give it directly to the transformer obejct, see line2 of the above code.