Fixing the switchinline transform for Help

Last week I spend quite amount of time chasing a bug on the new Help XSL transformation (XSLT) to implement the <switchinline> tag of the Help.

The initial idea was to map the <switchinline> into a javascript <switch> which is a straightforward to implement, but since the devil is in the details, I had hard times to realize that I set the output of a XSL transform as html, and when it comes to javascript, assigning a string to the output of the transform brings many issues.

Specifically, I had the issue when approaching an output like

<![CDATA[case "MAC" : text = "]]>\

<xsl:apply-templates/>\

<![CDATA[");]]>

with the output of the <xsl:apply-templates/> call resulting in strings with carriage return, apostrophes and quotes, which can't be put inside a javascript string unless adding a post processing to remove at least the LF and CR characters. So I implemented the <switchinline> inside a outer wrapping <span> and each each <case> content output into an inner <span> tag.

<span hidden="true" id="{$auxID}">\

<xsl:apply-templates/>\

</span>

Then I played with the "hidden" attribute, emulating the javascript "case" with logic inside the wrapping <span>.