Leveraging Coldfusion & Url Rewriting to Style XSL

As with building a sitemap dynamically, the first step in building a dynamic xsl file is to convert it from xsl to cfm. We simple rename it from sitemap.xsl to sitemapXsl.cfm .

At this point our sitemap.xml file is still pointing to sitemap.xsl so we either change the pointer in the sitemap file, or as I prefer we create a rewrite rule that points traffic for sitemap.xsl to sitemapXsl.cfm as follows.

#Sitemap XSL rule
RewriteRule ^sitemap.xsl/?$   sitemapXsl.cfm [L,NC]

Set the Encoding and Load the CFML

Now that we have the xsl file converted to cfm we need to instruct our cfml engine to serve it as an xsl file. To do this we place the following three directives at the top of our sitemapXsl.cfm file.

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true" showdebugoutput="false">
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="utf-8">
<cfcontent type="text/xsl">

Override Default Encoding

It is important to note that if you have set a doctype in your site template that this must be disabled or it will conflict with the xsl declaration. To do this I use a simple param as follows.

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true" showdebugoutput="false">
<cfprocessingdirective pageencoding="utf-8">
<cfcontent type="text/xsl">
<!---Override site default doc type--->
<cfset doctypeOverride = true>