The stylesheet provides structure and tagging information. Unfortunately, XSLT 1.0, the version most commonly supported by design tools and processors does not support operations such as grouping. Because grouping is a key aspect of converting a tabular structure to a hierarchy, Teradata allows you to annotate the stylesheet with special elements that provide hints as to how grouping should be done. These elements do not show up in the result document. The following sections describe these special elements.
The term annotation used here does not mean using comments. The process of constructing the stylesheet can be done within the graphical design environment provided by Stylus Studio and Tiger XSLT Mapper. The capability these tools have in common is to construct elements on the target schema; therefore, these annotations are in the form of XML Element nodes and not XML Comment nodes.