Web Application Component Toolkit

Transform View

The Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture definition of Transform View:

“A view that processes domain data element by element and transforms it into HTML.”

The transform view pattern is typically implemented using XSLT.

Martin Fowler's take on the difference between Transform View and Template View in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture:

“The key difference between Transform View and Template View is the way in which the view is organized. A Template View is organized around the output. A Transform View is organized around separate transforms for each kind of input element.”

There is some discussion in favor of the Transform View vs the Template View in Proprietary template systems versus the standard XSLT.

Systems built round the Transform View pattern include;

Transform Views and Web Applications

Transform View is one approach to generating the user interface of a web application. Instead of organizing a view primarily around the final output, the transformation process can work with individual pieces of application data and convert them into the required presentation format.

XSLT and XML-based transformations were particularly important when applications needed to produce structured output in different forms. The same general challenge of converting application data into a useful user interface continues to be part of web application development today.

As web technologies have evolved, some of the work involved in creating and updating user interfaces has moved from the server to the client. Modern browser-based applications can perform rendering and interaction directly in the browser while still receiving data and services from a server.