# Ant User Manual

## Style

### Description

Process a set of documents via XSLT.

This is useful for building views of XML based documentation, or in generating code.

It is possible to refine the set of files that are being copied. This can be done with the includes, includesfile, excludes, excludesfile and defaultexcludes attributes. With the includes or includesfile attribute you specify the files you want to have included by using patterns. The exclude or excludesfile attribute is used to specify the files you want to have excluded. This is also done with patterns. And finally with the defaultexcludes attribute, you can specify whether you want to use default exclusions or not. See the section on directory based tasks, on how the inclusion/exclusion of files works, and how to write patterns.

This task forms an implicit FileSet and supports all attributes of `<fileset>` (`dir` becomes `basedir`) as well as the nested `<include>`, `<exclude>` and `<patternset>` elements.

Style supports the use of a <param> element which is used to pass values to an <xsl:param> declaration.

### Parameters

Attribute | Description | Required
basedir | where to find the source XML file. | Yes
destdir | directory in which to store the results. | Yes
extension | desired file extension to be used for the targets. If not specified, the default is "html". | No
style | name of the stylesheet to use - given either relative to the basedir attribute or as an absolute path. | Yes
processor | name of the XSLT processor to use. Permissible values are "trax" for a TraX compliant processor, "xslp" for the XSL:P processor, "xalan" for the Apache XML Xalan (version 1) processor, or the name of an arbitrary XSLTLiaison class. Defaults to trax, followed by xslp then xalan (in that order). The first one found in your class path is the one that is used. | No
includes | comma separated list of patterns of files that must be included. All files are included when omitted. | No
includesfile | the name of a file. Each line of this file is taken to be an include pattern | No
excludes | comma separated list of patterns of files that must be excluded. No files (except default excludes) are excluded when omitted. | No
excludesfile | the name of a file. Each line of this file is taken to be an exclude pattern | No
defaultexcludes | indicates whether default excludes should be used or not ("yes"/"no"). Default excludes are used when omitted. | No
in | specifies a single XML document to be styled. Should be used with the out attribute. | No
out | specifies the output name for the styled result from the in attribute. | No

### Parameters specified as nested elements

#### param

Param is used to pass a parameter to the XSL stylesheet.

#### Parameters

Attribute | Description | Required
name | Name of the XSL parameter | Yes
expression | XSL expression to be placed into the param. To pass a text value into the style sheet it needs to be escaped using single quotes. | Yes

### Examples

>     <style basedir="doc" destdir="build/doc"
>            extension="html" style="style/apache.xsl"/>

> #### Using XSL parameters

>     <style basedir="doc" destdir="build/doc"
>     		extension="html" style="style/apache.xsl">
>     	<param name="date" expression="'07-01-2000'"/>
>     </style>

> This will replace an xsl:param definition<xsl:param name="date"></xsl:param> with the text value 07-01-2000

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