You need an XML file to work with containing the product data you would like to display in your document. You can create an XML file with a simple text-editing tool like WordPad or have it generated from a database by jCatalog, for example. The XML file that we use as an example here is rather simple. The structure of the XML file looks like this:
Report is the top node, which begins and ends the file and frames the contents. It contains Product Groups which have two nodes each: ProductGroupID and Name. Each Product Group contains Products. These Products each possess four nodes: ProductNumber, Name, ProductPrice and Properties. In each Properties node there are four more nodes: Height, Weight, Color and img.
The actual file is of course filled with data. We have some products in the file within two product groups, Chairs and Tables.
You will find this file with the name EXAMPLE.xml in the folder XSLfast\input\Tutorial\10_Example_Manual\XML. You will also find some images named according to the XML file (Chair1.jpg, Chair2.jpg, Chair3.jpg, Table1.jpg, Table2.jpg and Table3.jpg) in the folder XSLfast\input\Tutorial\10_Example_Manual\img. The flower bouquet is also there with the name Spring.jpg and the simple logo we used for this example (GenericLogo.jpg). If you want to add some images, please save these in the same folder as well.
We also provide you with the complete layout file described in this chapter, which has the name EXAMPLE.xsf. It contains some more decorative elements than described here to match the layout of all the other examples in the Tutorial folder.