Running XSL Transforms Whenever You Change Your XSL File

I don't often have to write XSL transforms these days; it just doesn't come up as often as it did 10-15 years ago. On the rare occasion I do have to tinker with XSLT, I'd like instant feedback. I want to see the results of my changes right away, without having to manually run the transform (either from the command line or a menu item).

There are tools which can do this, but I don't do it often enough to justify paying for another software license. So I've cobbled together a couple of PowerShell scripts and a Chrome extension which give me instant feedback. Even if you don't have my specific problem (converting an XML report into a nice HTML version), you might find at least one part of this low-rent XSL studio useful.

I do my XSLT editing in Notepad++, but any editor will do for this setup.

The first thing we need is a way to run the XSL transform. Luckily, that's dead simple to do in PowerShell because we have access to the .NET System.Xml namespace. Loading an XSL file from disk, compiling the transform, running it against an XML document, and sending the output to another file can be done in a few lines of code. Here's the entire xsl.ps1 script:

  [string]$outputFile = "output.xml"

$xmlFile = [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath([System.IO.Path]::Combine((Get-Location), $xmlFile))
$xsltFile = [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath([System.IO.Path]::Combine((Get-Location), $xsltFile))
$outputFile = [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath([System.IO.Path]::Combine((Get-Location), $outputFile))

# Create the transform
$xslt = New-Object System.Xml.Xsl.XslCompiledTransform( $false )

# Create a couple of other argument objects we'll need
$arglist = new-object System.Xml.Xsl.XsltArgumentList

# Load the XSL file
$xslt.Load($xsltFile, $xsltSettings, (New-Object System.Xml.XmlUrlResolver))

# Open a file for output
$outFile = New-Object System.IO.FileStream($outputFile, [System.IO.FileMode]::Create, [System.IO.FileAccess]::Write)

# Run the transform
$xslt.Transform($xmlFile, $arglist, $outFile)

# Close the output file

I should add a disclaimer that this script supports my specific scenario; a more idiomatically PowerShell-ish script would probably allow you to pipe the XML content in and return the result instead of just writing it to a file. But I'm lazy and this gets the job done. To use it, you simply specify the source XML file, the XSLT file, and optionally the path to the output file:

xsl .\example.xml .\example.xslt .\example.html

Next, we need a way to watch the XSL file so we can re-run the previous script every time it changes. The .NET Framework provides the handy FileSystemWatcher class for exactly this kind of thing. You can point it at a path and it will raise events when that path changes. And PowerShell has a command called Register-ObjectEvent which allow us to subscribe to framework object events and run PowerShell script blocks when they occur. Here's my watch.ps1 script which watches a target path and runs the specified script block whenever the file at that path changes:


if(-not [System.IO.Path]::IsPathRooted($target)) {
    $target = [System.IO.Path]::GetFullPath([System.IO.Path]::Combine((Get-Location), $target))

if($action -eq "stop") { 
    Write-Host "Stopping watch on $target"
    Unregister-Event FileChanged 
    Write-Host "Stopped"
} else {
    $fsw = New-Object IO.FileSystemWatcher ([System.IO.Path]::GetDirectoryName($target)), ([System.IO.Path]::GetFileName($target)) -Property @{IncludeSubdirectories = $false; NotifyFilter = [IO.NotifyFilters]'FileName, LastWrite'} 

    Register-ObjectEvent $fsw Changed -SourceIdentifier FileChanged -MessageData $action -Action { 
        try {
            iex ($Event.MessageData)
        catch [Exception] {
            write-host $_.Exception.ToString();

    $fsw.EnableRaisingEvents = $True 

This is pretty straightforward. The script creates a FileSystemWatcher and then registers for the Changed event; when that event occurs, it invokes the script block specified by the -Action parameter. Note that we're not directly passing our $action parameter to Register-ObjectEvent; rather, we're using Invoke-Expression to call it and wrapping it in a try/catch block. This way, we can output any errors we get from the $action and still keep responding to later events. This is important for the XSLT process, because I make a lot of mistakes when trying to get XSL transforms working correctly. If I make a mistake in my XSL document, the exception information will pop up in my terminal window as soon as I hit "Save".

Firing up the watch script with the XSL transform is simple:

watch.ps1 .\example.xslt {xsl .\example.xml .\example.xslt example.html}

The watcher will continue to run in the background until we manually stop it:

watch.ps1 .\example.xslt stop

The final piece in my bootleg XSL studio is the LivePage extension for Chrome. It can watch an HTML document and automatically reload it whenever it changes. Just point it at the output HTML file (and make sure to check "Allow access to file URLs" for LivePage in the Chrome Extensions settings), and as you make your XSL changes you'll see the result in the browser.

Just a side note - it is technically possible to do most of this in Chrome without the PowerShell scripts; you just have to link your XML document with your stylesheet and run Chrome with the --allow-file-access-from-files switch. But it's kind of a pain to have to add the stylesheet reference to your XML document and manually refresh Chrome all the time. So I prefer my (admittedly) convoluted setup. Your mileage my vary.