Hi Chris,

Curious as to why you'd like examples of these in XSLT?  Is it to prove that they can be in within XSLT, or another reason?

For executing a SQL statement from XSLT, there are a couple of packages offering that functionality:

http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/sql-for-xslt-(jespercom)

http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/a-sqlhelper-for-xslt

As for a contact form and login page - honestly these are better suited as user-controls (.NET code).  They can be done in XSLT, but it isn't pretty.

Lastly, navigation is best suited for XSLT.  Examples can be found via the Umbraco back-office; in the Developer section, right-click the XSLT tree, select Create and choose from the list of available example XSLT templates.

Cheers, Lee.

Hi Chris,

Just to chip in, though I agree with Lee:

You should think of XSLT as one (of several) way(s) to generate markup. It is not in any way a round-trip language (my own term for the .NET like postback behavior) so you shouldn't do any "controller" like stuff in XSLT. It's purely a "view" language very well suited for XML data. 

• SQL - While I understand the reasons for the various packages available for this, I think it's the very wrong place to do that sort of behavior.
• Contact Form - Actually XSLT is good for this, as long as you only handle the form generation - combined with a serverside control to handle the post and updating the model/datastore it could provide for a nice solution where the backend developer does everything he needs, leaving all the frontend form code to the frontend developer - huge win for both :-)
• Login Page - same as above.
• Navigation - If the data is an XML tree (like Umbraco), there's no better tool for this job - only problem is that (almost) every site has it's own little quirks in how the navigation should behave, so almost every "all-purpose" navigation package becomes a huge mess of configurations & conditionals. Starting from scratch with a couple of simple templates usually gets the job done much more efficiently. Look here for more about navigations and XSLT 

Thanks for the input guys.. I am purely looking to tackle XSLT everyway i can. Ive really only used it to read or output XML in the past, so today after writing a couple of XSLT <if> XSLT <choose> I wanted to dive alittle bit more into this since everyone is demanding XSLT HTML5 and JSON because it's the " New Fad or Big Thing" of development and design. 

I've just dove into Umbraco maybe 3-4 weeks ago, im starting to get comfortable with it but I want to master XSLT if i can and kill two bird with one stone. 

By the way, a Contact Form and Login Pages completely in XSLT would be lovely if you can point me to one.,. 

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