Eclipse: Printing Editor Templates using XSLT, CSS, and Firefox

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I’m using Eclipse with RadRails to edit my Ruby and Rails code (and, yes, I’ve used it for Java, way back when).

Inside Eclipse the various text editors offer so-called templates. These are snippets of common code with placeholders for variable bits. Type in the abbreviation for a template, then type Ctrl-Space and the abbreviation is expanded to the template code. For editing Ruby/Rails templates are available from the RadRails Templates site.

I’ve only recently started to use templates and I’m still early on the learning curve, that is, I haven’t memorized many of the abbreviations. Unfortunately, Eclipse itself only has a list of templates with their expansions in its modal Preferences window. That’s not very helpful when coding. What Eclipse does have is a function to export templates to XML and that’s what I did.

The exported file looks like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<templates>
  <template autoinsert="true" context="ruby" deleted="false" description="tm - all? { |e| .. }" enabled="true" name="all">all? { |${e}| ${cursor} }
  </template>
  <template autoinsert="true" context="ruby" deleted="false" description="tm - alias_method .." enabled="true" name="am">alias_method :${new_name}, :${old_name}
  </template>
  ...
</templates>

The easiest approach I could think of to make this into something printable is this. First, transform it into HTML using an XSL stylesheet, then make the HTML pretty by styling it with an CSS stylesheet. Luckily, most of this can be done inside a web browser such as Firefox that understands XSLT.

Here’s the XSLT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

<xsl:template match="/">
  <html>
    <head>
      <xsl:apply-templates mode="head" />
      <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="templates.css" />
    </head>
    <body>
      <xsl:apply-templates mode="body" />
    </body>
  </html>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="title" mode="head">
  <title>
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
  </title>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="title" mode="body">
  <h1>
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
  </h1>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="templates" mode="body">
  <dl>
    <xsl:apply-templates mode="body" />
  </dl>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template match="template" mode="body">
  <dt>
    <xsl:value-of select="@name" />
  </dt>
  <dd>
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
  </dd>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

And the CSS stylesheet

html {
  font-family: sans-serif;
}

dt {
  border-top: 1px solid #aaa;
  padding-top: 0.2em;
  font-weight: bold;
}

dd {
  margin-top: 0.3em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
  white-space: pre;
  font-family: monospace;
}

Now, these parts need to be connected. For this, it is necessary to slightly edit the original XML template file. For good measure, I throw in a title.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="templates.xsl" ?>
<templates>
  <title>RadRails Ruby Templates</title>
  <template ...>
    ...
  </template>

You may find that the indentation for the template code looks wrong. The reason is that the code contains tabs for indentation. Ruby convention is to indent by 2 spaces for each level, by contrast, Firefox apparently expands tabs to 8 spaces. A small glitch that can be rectified easily

$ sed -i 's/\t/  /g' template.xml