Strings strings strings strings...

I was just talking to someone internally about this, and thought I should post it: All of the values that the Data View Web Part get back are strings. Basically, we just take the values in the XML and display them as they are (in some cases, like with SharePoint data, we can be a little bit smart about how to format these strings, but still, we get it wrong sometimes).

So, what does that mean to you? It means that if you want your XML data to look a certain way, you need to use either FrontPage's formatting tools, or hand-code some XSLT.

In some cases, hand-coding will be the only way to go.

So in the how to section, I'm going to start posting quick XSLT code snippets to help with some formatting issues.

For example, <xsl:value-of select=”substring-before(@URL, ', ')”/> grabs you everything before the comma in a URL field type.

So if you have a code snippet to share or if you have a question you think might be a Top 10, share it. I only have about five or six to post for now.

-John